Ask Amy: A Toy Kitchen Brings Up Stereotype Questions

[minoanmiss]

. My husband and I have a daughter, “Emma.” She is 3. We are thoughtful and responsible parents (at least we think so).

We have a question about gift-giving.

Our daughter goes to a nursery school program a couple of mornings a week, and it’s going very well. While at school, she loves to play with a miniature kitchen set. It’s got a little sink and a pretend stove with pots and pans.

We told my sister that we are thinking about getting a version of this for our daughter for Christmas (my sister also has children), but she is strongly disapproving because, as she says, this sort of toy “reinforces gender stereotypes.”

Now we feel weird about it and decided to seek your take.

WONDERING PARENTS

A. Many parents are concerned about reinforcing gender stereotypes … right up until that moment when their toddler son really loves to play with his cousin’s toy bulldozer, or their daughter falls in love with a Tiny Tammy doll.
Are you willing to deny your child the joy and learning experience of playing with an object she really loves in order to please your sister, or to pat yourselves on the back about adhering consistently to your powerful ideals? I hope not.

In my opinion, you have absorbed the very real issue of gender stereotyping in a sideways fashion. The idea is not to deny your child toys that are stereotypically associated with their gender, but to expansively offer them toys and experiences that are typically associated with any gender.

You might think of play (like gender) as occurring across a spectrum that the child has the power and autonomy to determine as they go — not the parents (or, for that matter, the marketing departments of toy companies).

And so, if your son wants a Tiny Tammy doll, he should receive it and be encouraged/allowed to play with it, and if your daughter chooses to wash her toy bulldozer in her pretend kitchen sink, then more power to her.

The boundary I would draw (this Christmas and on into the future) is around toys that encourage violence or mimic weaponry. (And yes, we all know that your daughter can pretend her wiffleball bat is a gun, but at the end of the day, she knows it’s a wiffleball bat.)

Comments

[cereta]

Toy companies have gotten savvy about this. Toy kitchens are no longer marketed solely to girls (although there are stereotypically "girlier" versions, often): they're made in primary colors, with boys on the boxes. Even little cleaning sets have more gender-neutral versions. I suspect that a rise in organized day care has contributed to this: little boys are presented with toy kitchens absent a lot of the gender-panic parents can have, and if there's any force more powerful than gender-panic, it's parents' need for things that keep toddlers busy.

[ethelmay]

When I was a kid, a lot of classic toys weren't packaged in boy/girl versions because they were "obviously" for a boy or a girl already (and when I was a bit older there was a market for consciously gender-neutral stuff as well). So the toy kitchens were often in primary or natural colors then, too. I got my kids a secondhand toy sewing machine from the 1970s. The brand was Junior Miss and it had a girl on the box, but it was red and white and the girl was wearing a red turtleneck or something. An early 2000s equivalent would have been pink/purple/sparkly, which is all very well in itself, but as a signifier of Not for Boys makes me ill.