Posted on 04/16/2010 10:46:40 AM PDT by ilovesarah2012
THURSDAY, April 15 (HealthDay News) -- Parents may want their girls to grow up to be astronauts and their boys to one day do their fair share of child care and housework duties, but a new study suggests certain stereotypical gender preferences take root even before most kids can crawl.
When presented with seven different toys, boys as young as 9 months old went for the car, digger and soccer ball, while ignoring the teddy bears, doll and cooking set.
And the girls? You guessed it. At the same age, they were most interested in the doll, teddy bear and miniature pot, spoon and plastic vegetables.
"The boys always preferred the toys that go or move, and the girls preferred toys that promote nurturing and facial features," said study author Sara Amalie O'Toole Thommessen, an undergraduate at City University in London.
So does this mean that boys and girls have an innate preference for certain types of objects? Or does socialization -- that is, the influence of parents and the larger culture -- impact children's choice of toys very early in life?
It's too soon to rule either out, said Walter Gilliam, director of the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Yup. Live with it.
When my children were very young the boys would play with cars and trucks and so would the girls.
The difference between them was the boys made sound effects - even the shifting of the gears. The girls never did.
Actually, she’ll be learning Hindi. She’s only 5, so I figure that by the time she’s ready to start training there will be several active private aerospace companies, including in India, which is probably the most entrepreneurial of the countries with space programs.
My boss is in India at this very moment doing business with some entrepreneurs electronic start ups!................
People in India speak English, actually I worked with a team of Indians, and noticed they always spoke English to each other. The reason is that there are so many different languages in India, English is the only common language they all understood.
My feminist neighbor's experience. Her first child was a boy: she gave him Tonka trucks and tanks and humvees and he went vroom-vroom and crashed them together and maxed out on the concepts of acceleration, collision, and combustion, and thought that was great.
Her second child, a girl, was given her brother's old toys. And she thought they were great, too. She put them in a circle and put little hats on them and "taught" them to sing the Raffi song, "Brown Girl In the Ring, Tr-la-la-la-la."
And no, I am not making that up.
Like I said, once I had my own kids I realized boys will be boys and girls will be girls. However, my neighbors have a 6 year old daughter who loves bugs. Spends hours outside turning over rocks and finding bugs. She is getting her little sister (3) involved now as well. LOL But she doesn’t like snakes.
I was quite a tomboy when I was young but mostly because we didn’t have any girls in the neighborhood and if I wanted to play, it would be football, baseball, war, cops/robbers, Indians/Cowboys, etc. It was fun, though and I got to play with all those cut boys!
I bet you are proud of her. I wanted to be a pirate when I was young. Or a hobo. Seemed like fun occupations at the time.
Vive le differnce! Now if they would just stay that way when grown!
WHAT! NO WAR TOYS?!!!!
This is a biased study!
Every boy everywhere wants to kill the bad guy and save civilization from the evil hordes.
Give a boy a toy M16 or a Phaser Blaster and he and his friends will have hours of fun slaying the enemies of the Republic.
Normal people realize this is normal. A caring person would ensure that children are taught to embrace our differences, and learn how to be men and women. Unfortunately for society today they want to blend them all together, and we wind up with confused, angry and depressed people.
if your male child reaches for the cooking set either prepare for gay pink as a future clothing option for the boy or salivate at the idea that you will have a chef for a son that will up the quality of food options available in the future :-). Could go either way. lol.
I would if I knew how to post pics.
LOL - so true.
When they were older I also observed that she was more complex to deal with that her brothers were.
The boys all I had to do was yell at them and they straightened right up but when I tried that on my daughter she would cry and shut down. I had to be much more gentle and reasoning.
Huge contrasts that seemed built in from day one.
I love all of them and we all get along great, I just see differences and had to adjust to them a bit.
You would be surprised how much some hobo’s make.
The news in my sister’s town of Burlington, NC did an article on a “pan-handler” that was widely known in town. The man was always sitting at the end of the I-85 off-ramp at the various exits in the area, always with a “need money for food”, “have 3 kids”, etc etc etc. Looked the part, very unkempt, ratty clothes, etc.
Well, one of the locals saw a man with his family at a really nice resort in Myrtle Beach, and was shocked at how closely he resembled this “hobo”. So when they got back to town they started looking for the guy, and sure enough he was at the end of one of the ramps. So they parked down the street with a camera, and waited. Later that afternoon they followed the guy as he walked down a couple blocks, turned the corner, went into a grocery store parking lot, took off his hat and wig, and jumped into a brand new Lexus.
Seemed the guy was making a KILLING pan-handling, and was actually quite wealthy.
LOL - A few years ago the news did a story on “homeless” in our town. I remember one guy saying on a good day he could bring in $300 to $400. Great work if you can get it.
Liberal huffed away.
I knew it!!! "Ken" is a homo!
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