As a child walking into a toy store was fascinating, from looking around seeing so many colors. I can remember when I was younger not knowing where to look. And even now if I go to a toy store I still get fascinated walking into one and getting to the toy section. As your in the store you notice how toys are different depending on genders even colors, there are specific aisle for boy and girl also babies. The girls aisle has all the barbies, ponies, makeup and pink colored things that only a girl would dream of having. The boy aisle has nerf guns and monster trucks and LEGO’s which only a tough boy would play with. We observe that if we are a girl we get girl toys like makeup and dolls and boys get trucks. We take these toys and start to make connections with which toys boing to girls or boys and we start to like them as kids based off of the toys we were given as kids and saw the other sex playing with. The boy aisle has nothing but pictures of boys and dads playing monster trucks or nerf guns together. The girl aisle has girls and moms playing dress up with makeup or playing with ponies. I have younger siblings at home and it’s funny he seems to go more towards cars, action figures and such. On the other hand my sister because of her brother she wanted “boy toys’ ‘ but now she is going more into ponies and babies. Personally I feel like it’s in our nature to find some attraction on the way. Since certain toys are only played with by boys then those toys are easily labeled as a boy toy or a girl toy. Since most of us raise our kids to live within our gender, boys and girls know that they must play with the appropriate toy of their gender.
There are gender neutral games like board games and things like that which do feature pictures of boys and girls on the advertising. However there are many more aisles of specific gender toys than there are of gender neutral toys. we as a society created gender neutral toys by allowing our kids to only be able to play with certain toys. If we took kids in a store and let them pick whatever they wanted maybe these gender neutral toys would not exist. but instead we take our son or daughter their gender appropriate toys and have them pick from those only.
Socially Loco 