A study conducted by the University of Sydney, Australia, shows that boys, like girls, are more attracted to babies than to cars in the first months of their lives.
If at Christmas, you plan to offer your boy toy cars or a truck, here is a study that may well change your mind.
While toy stores, under pressure from parents and feminist associations, have for some years begun to reflect on the gender stereotypes conveyed by their shelves and catalogs, work carried out by researcher Paola Escudero from Western University from Sydney challenge the idea that boys prefer to play cars and other ‘manly’ games.
Published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology in 2013, this study shows on the contrary that it is our own stereotyped perception that influences what children play with. “Everybody likes to buy dolls for baby girls and cars and trucks for baby boys. That’s quite simply what we do,” explains Dr. Paola Escudero, lead author of the work.
A preference of girls and boys for dolls
To study the sexual preferences of babies, the researchers recruited 48 children aged 4 to 5 months (24 girls and 24 boys), as well as 48 young adults (24 women and 24 men).
They then showed them pictures of men, women, dolls, cars and ovens. Objective ? Determine the participants’ preference for the object in order to know which interested them the most. The results showed that all of the participants, even the babies, held their gaze longer on the dolls than on the cars, suggesting that they are more likely to play with objects that have faces. All infants showed a preference for human faces, whether real faces or doll faces.
“Using state-of-the-art eye-tracking technology, we found that these sex-specific preferences are not present at five months, indicating that they are the result of physiological changes (e.g., their hormonal levels), cognitive development or social pressures”, analyzes Dr. Escudero.
The researcher and her team recognize, however, that further work is needed to determine whether a sexual preference for certain toys manifests later and, especially what later triggers boys’ interest in stereotypical toys associated with men.
In the meantime, it is always possible to slip a baby doll for a boy and a fire truck for a girl under the tree.
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