Some creative minds are more interested in nurseries and tea parties than in trains or robots. And it's natural for it to be so.
It's evident once you have some kids. I truly wanted that not to be the case, but reality bites.
For the PC crowd: This of course doesn't mean that girls will never play with robots or cars or that boys won't play with nurseries or tea parties. Of course a mix is healthy and should be encouraged. But the stereotypical preferences are truly marked in most cases, before parental intervention.
To be honest I think my biggest complaints about lego are cost and that it is hard just to get a big bag of basic bricks.
However I think the 'Friends' thing could have been better handled with modest tweaks. Why aren't there any boys/men in 'Friends'? What if boys want to play nurseries or tea parties.
When I was young the lego characters were mostly gender free but it seems increasingly that the 'boys' lego increasingly has male characters (even outside the branded Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings stuff). All the Firefighters and Police seem to be men when they could have been much more gender neutral (or mixed genders) without loss of fun to boys or girls.
That's not exactly true. Kids will play with whatever they want until they feel pressure to conform from either parents (if a girl asks for a toy, she's handed a Barbie) or society (marketing only showing girls playing with dolls, kitchen sets.)
You might think your child had no parental intervention, but parents are only one factor in enforcing gender roles. Are you sure you've kept them from watching TV, reading, and playing with other kids whose parents are not like you?
That's the key point. I've observed that ones tend to want one things and the others tend to want other things.
Of course there's cultural intervention, people do not live in bubbles, but it's much more subtle and, I believe, innate than what you think before having children (one data point: my daughter that I swore would never wear pink, actively prefers pink clothes, she wears other colors as well, but given a choice, usually chooses pink and from a really early age)
But there's nothing genetic that determines girls like pink more. It's all social. Your daughter probably saw all the toys and clothes directed at her being pink, all the positive attention she got when she wore that "cute" dress that happened to be pink, and all the little girls her age on television who she looked up to also wearing it.
I meant kids will play with anything. Dolls, trucks, anything their hands can get ahold of. It's only once their parents or society starts subtly and not-so-subtly telling them they should be playing with these toys and not those toys do they start having a noticeable preference. Boys aren't hard-wired to like trucks and girls aren't hard-wired to like EZ Bake Ovens. That's all society.
Yes, kids will play with anything. However, the way they use toys to play will be individual.
My daughter preferred cars and trucks while young (under 4 years). She would cover the garage with blanket for the night, put her small truck to swing etc. The style of play was very different from the way that I saw boys playing with similar toys.
All I'm trying to say is that I was of your same opinion, but facts do not support that opinion in my experience. Of course I have not done an actual controlled experiment, just some observations and little tests along the years. Yes, they will play with anything, but they still show preferences. Are those purely social? I'm not sure.
That said, I am still of the opinion that it is indeed mainly social, but that it is less social than one thinks it is, before.
I'd love to see some actual science about this, got any?
I don't have the original study I read (back in a cognitive development class in college), but I believe this one[0] should suffice. The original was a study that monitored groups of kids playing with toys and found the kids didn't develop a gendered preference until parents began interfering with toy selection. If the parents didn't interfere, they wouldn't develop a gendered preference until school age where they began interacting with other children.
It's evident once you have some kids. I truly wanted that not to be the case, but reality bites.
For the PC crowd: This of course doesn't mean that girls will never play with robots or cars or that boys won't play with nurseries or tea parties. Of course a mix is healthy and should be encouraged. But the stereotypical preferences are truly marked in most cases, before parental intervention.