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 ...
Liberals are just weird. LOL
They did a similar report in Tucson when I lived there in the early 90s. One guy had a house, two new cars and really nice stuff. They estimated the guy was bringing in anywhere from $150 - $250 daily - tax free.
Funny how those who tell us to “embrace diversity” are horrified by and recoil from the reality of it.
Boys, girls ... different? The horror!
Yup! So this scientifically proves that nine-year-olds have "gay-dar"! lol!
(Actually, if you take off the clothes and look, Ken is a Eunuch. Perfectly suited to guarding my Barbie Dream House, but nothing more.)
Yep GI Joe was on the “down low” with Ken, you know “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
ROFL, we both would’ve been in serious trouble if we were kids in this generation. I played with and loved my little green army men and the cowboys and indians. Nothing was better than those in the sandbox.
And my Barbie of choice was “The Bionic Woman.” Tsk, I always wondered why the other girls thought I was weird.
My all-time favorite toys were the Star Wars action figures with the Millennium Falcon and articulating ton-ton. :-)
(Yes, I liked everything better if it articulated! lol!)
I never did like the Ken dolls. I one cut a chunk out of a Ken’s leg and covered it with lipstick. I had a plastic Saint Bernard who’s mouth and chest I covered with the same lipstick.
Yes, the dog ravaged Ken’s leg.
My mom was so mad about her lipstick! lol!
My girlfriends and I had a play group set up for our first borns.
The boys “borrowed” the girl’s baby buggy and loaded it up with trucks and blocks to transfer their dirt moving and building activity out to the yard... So typical - by two years old.
Folks, you can't counteract thousands and thousands of years of evolution.
Six years later he used to rotate the tires on a car that I kept in my Garage, his sister Ratted on him.
Thirty-Three years later he can fix anything that has a motor in it and exceeds 26,000 GVW and the stuff that hangs off of it.
In 2007 I bought my Grandson the same Truck, Tonka,, and we pushed him around in it.
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with angle brackets, also called chevrons, at the beginning and the end. > at the end and < at the beginning.
At some point they will show this same effect in utero and it will be “too soon” to draw conclusions about nature vs socialization.
Surely through life long drug regimens, surgical modification and cultural indoctrination we could cure some of this sexual normality impulse.
There's your clue. She wants to please you.
No, I thought that too, but her wanting to be an astronaut was her idea, and she only turned away from it because she thought it would mean she wouldn’t get to make art. I showed her that the two are not mutually exclusive (and actually, astronauts have painted some of the most striking pieces I have seen). I never pressured her to change her mind, though I do try to encourage her to admire careers that are challenging. She is quite bright, and was able to make the connection that doing one thing doesn’t necessarily mean giving up other things one likes to do on her own. I have always told her that I will be happy with whatever she does.
I wouldn't count on this professor getting future funding if he keeps on coming to the "wrong" conclusions like this.
She also is very interested in becoming an aircraft pilot. I have explained (to the extent that she can understand) what is involved in being an astronaut, and she has several books on the kinds of things real astronauts do, so she knows it’s more than just riding up in a rocket. Because her interest, while lofty (pun intended), is realistic, I see no reason not to encourage her to pursue it as much as possible. It is fun to think about being a storybook pirate or hobo when you grow up, but those aren’t realistic careers. Being a pilot, and even a commercial astronaut, is realistic, no matter that such a goal is one that anyone would have to work hard to achieve. Having challenging but achievable goals is the stuff true success is made of.
When I was growing up, I was very interested in space too, but the likelihood of actually becoming an astronaut was incredibly slim, because even having the shuttle meant that there would never be more than a couple of hundred astronauts, not all of whom would ever fly. The new world of commercial space travel means that in 20 years, there could very well be a thriving cargo and passenger market for at least suborbital travel, and every pilot or spacecraft crewmember a company has is one more flight that they can make money from. There is every possibility that commercial astronaut could be a completely feasible and otherwise legitimate career in less than two decades. That goes doubly so because of the Zer0’s proclamation that we are abandoning most of our space program and planning to rely on commercial lifters and other countries’ space programs for our orbital needs. While I don’t agree with his decision, it may spur all those little startup space companies to increase their capacity.
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