London - Boys and girls prefer toys specific to their gender even as babies, a study shows.
Boys as young as nine months were more interested in playing with trucks, while girls chose cooking pots.
In older toddlers, the girls took more of an interest in typical boys’ toys such as cars and balls. The boys were still less inclined to play with dolls, however.
The researchers suggest this may be because parents encourage girls to play with a wider variety of toys. Because these differences appear so early on, biology – an inbuilt gender difference – rather than gender stereotyping must be playing a significant role in how boys’ and girls’ preferences develop, they say. The researchers, from University College London and City University, studied 101 infants in three age groups.
The youngest were aged nine months – the earliest that infants can demonstrate which toys they like best – to 17 months. The others were 18 to 23 months and 24 to 32 months.
The children were tested at four London nurseries. They were seated 3ft from the toys, which had been chosen as gender-specific – a doll, a pink teddy bear and a cooking pot for girls and a car, a blue teddy, a digger and a ball for the boys – and arranged in random order in a semi-circle around them. A record was kept of which toys were touched.
Lead researcher Dr Brenda Todd of City University said: ‘Even in the youngest group of children we were still seeing sex differences in their preferences. The other interesting thing is that as they get older, boys get more and more interested in boy toys, whereas that wasn’t the case for the girls.’
‘I think stereotypes are much more rigid for little boys, and even older boys, than little girls. It’s OK for girls to play with pretty much everything, we see more pressure for girls to widen their use of toys. We don’t see the equivalent social awareness to encourage boys to show greater nurturance behaviour, yet we expect adult men to be great fathers and cook in the home.’
The study, published in Infant And Child Development, argues that because there is a clear difference at such a young age this probably is a biological effect, as the babies were yet to have had extensive exposure to gender stereotypes.
The early preferences may be caused by exposure to male hormones in the womb, the researchers say.
This is supported by findings that show girls exposed to higher levels of male hormones are more likely to be tomboys.
Daily Mail