Why do boys and girls choose different toys? (Entry #4) [This is a summary I wrote after listening to a lecture in Delta book. I appreciate corrections in advance.] How is gender related to children’s tendencies in picking out their toys? Is it natural for boys to prefer cars and blocks and girls to play with kitchen toys, or is it all just social conditionings that lead to this decision? Studies have shown that two-year-old boys and girls do not care what their toys are. As they grow older they learn to choose different toys. According to this lecture, this preference is not actually a sexist plot injected by the governments into the society. Some studies on monkeys result in showing that this is only a natural behavior. In this experiment, male monkeys prefer to play with balls and cars, while female monkeys prefer dolls and pots. By expanding this research, we get the same result in humans. Some preschool children, eight boys and three girls were studied. All the boys played with blocks and started building towers. Two girls stayed with the kitchen stuff and one of them started coloring and painting. The rest of the studies indicate that younger kids have no such thought of being a girl or a boy. However, around the age of five, both sexes begin to differentiate toys. Sometimes it’s the older kids and sometimes the parents who reinforce the gender stereotypes. But research shows that kids are mostly naturally drawn to different types of toys.