Influence Of Gender Stereotypes In Toys

Activity 2

On Friday, March 3rd, at 10:23am, I walked into Toys-R-Us remembering how fun and exciting this store was when I was a young child. When I was little, however, I never thought about the wonderful toys in these stores being gender stereotyped. These toys can drastically influence children’s gender identities, or their experience of their own gender. The first obvious “girl” toy that I saw was close to the entrance against the wall. There were five shelves, maybe five feet in width. There was a big sign above this section with pictures of Barbies (no Ken dolls) and the sign read, “You can be anything”. At first I thought it was a good message to send to young girls. This could empower them to grow up to be strong and powerful women,
The first one that I saw was a “water table”. It was a small pool lifted up on a stand (similar looking to a bird bath, but this was plastic), so that small children could stand and splash around and play in the water. It has a mini slide for rubber ducks and little flippers to fling plastic frogs into the pool. The box was white and had a large picture showing both a boy and girl playing with the toy. The second neutral toy was a “super dunk splash pool”. It is a nice sized blow-up pool for little kids, “ages 3-6”. Although the pool has a blow-up basketball hoop at one end, it was not male stereotyped. The picture on the front showed two boys and two girls playing a game of basketball in the pool. When looking at the boy or girl targeted toys in comparison to the gender-neutral toys, there were a lot of differences in image. The gendered toys were boxed in gendered colors (pink and yellow or blue, red, and green) and showed either a boy or girl playing with the toy, whereas the neutral toys were in white boxes showing both genders playing with the toy. These toys also effect children at play. If a toy seems as though it is “only for boys” or “only for girls”, then when a child is with friends and wants to play with this toy, they will choose to play with children of the same sex. Gender neutral toys encourage friendships of both
They are telling kids that if you are a girl you should play with this type of toy, and if you are a boy, you should play with this type of toy. Through subtle visuals such as the color of the box and the sex of the child playing with the toy on the box, these children are being taught that they should identify with gender specific toys. It hard to believe that even toy stores play a role in shaping children’s self-identifications, which is how a child sees and views