AnnaBeth Crittenden, Campus Carrier Assistant Entertainment Editor
A few weeks ago, I began working at the Child Development Center (CDC) on campus. I supervise learning activities and play with the children. The CDC has a policy that allows kids to play with anything in the classroom during the playtime hours. This gives them access to many different toys, ranging from My Little Pony to Lincoln Logs. The children can move from one toy to the next—assuming that they will always clean up after themselves.
On my first day on the job, when the teacher let the children have their free play, a little boy went immediately to the Polly Pockets and began playing with them. My initial reaction was one of shock. The fashion dolls were ones I had always associated with girls. I assumed the other children would start teasing the little boy and I braced myself for an intervention. However, the intervention was unnecessary. Some girls came over and began playing with the Polly Pockets as well, with no care that there was a boy playing with these female-associated toys.
Over the week, I noticed the same thing happening with multiple toys. Girls would head to the Legos and begin building cars. Boys and girls would gallop My Little Pony dolls around the table. Play-Doh was grabbed regardless of color and no boys complained when they received anything pink.
After my initial shock wore off, I was extremely impressed at these children who have seemingly forgone gender stereotypes in toys. I immediately thought that somehow the market for children’s toys had stopped stereotyping by gender. However, I soon discovered how wrong I was.
With gender stereotypes lessening for women as they enter the workforce and strive for gender equality, one would assume that gender stereotypes for children have lessened as well. And in some cases they have. But toys are marketed with two color schemes in mind: blue for boys and pink for girls.
According to the Guardian of April 22, 2014, toys and colors were not always divided by genders. Pink and blue became huge in marketing in the 1980’s when corporations wanted parents to buy more toys. If a parent buys a pink bicycle for their little girl, then they will be less likely to pass it down to their little boys, thus bringing in more revenue for the corporations.
Therefore, gender stereotypes in toys were created due to commodification. Because of this capitalistic mindset, slowly our minds were changed as well. Producers and consumers became trapped in the tradition of pinks and blues and found that there was no gray area.
This gray area causes more problems than slight ridiculing for children. With children, especially boys, it creates in them a social norm that they feel they must follow in order to find acceptance.
According to the Guardian, a nine-year-old boy in North Carolina was banned from bringing his My Little Pony bag to school because he was being bullied and called gay. This problem defines masculinity, as everything to boys, even the toys they play with, must fit society’s norm of being male. Therefore, in order to protect their “manliness,” boys feel threatened or scared to breech this gap between stereotypically male and female toys.
In Jo B. Paoletti’s book “Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America,” she comments on social norms formed in childhood. When children are between the ages of 3-5 (like the children at the CDC), they have developed a gender identity with no social constructs attached—the corporations have not yet begun to market to these children specifically by gender.
This of course, says something as well about the parents of the children. Although the children are not quite old enough to stereotype Barbies as for girls, their parents have the power to define their children’s gender stereotypes at home. If they surround their girls with pink and princesses, then that girl is going to enter preschool believing that these items are the social norm for her gender. In her mind, she knows she is a girl and she knows from watching that girls play with dolls and like pink. Although this may not always be the case for her as she gets older, the parents initially have much influence in the social constructs they place around their children.
Now, you may be wondering how children toys relate to those of us in college. Most of us don’t have children, why should we care about their playtime? Simple, gender stereotyping affects us all, whether we be children or adults. We cannot truly close the gender gap until we start fixing gender stereotyping at the earliest age possible by letting our children choose their toys based on their interests, not their genders.