What we are teaching our kids without noticing

Have you ever wondered why some girls want to play with Barbie dolls and a majority of boys love to play with cool race cars? Well, maybe if we start looking at our own influence on the choices of our kids, we can find an explanation…

A while ago I met up with a friend, who is really pro gender-equality, at a fair. At the fair she said to her daughter: “You can’t have that toy gun. Why don’t you take a toy for girls instead?” While listening to her, asked thought to myself: this is a typical example of the influence that parents can have on their child’s toy-choices. The mother encouraged her daughter to buy a toy that was linked to her child’s gender. I assumed she did this without noticing that she actually influenced her daughter. She really thinks gender-equality is important and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t say this consciously.

Looking into some scientific research, it seems obvious that parents influence the gender stereotypic behaviour of their children in many different ways. They treat their sons and daughters in a different manner, which results in different reactions and different behaviour of the children. For example, a research of Endendijk and others showed that fathers are more likely to slap or push their sons. They use a lot more communicative strategies with their daughters and a lot more physical strategies with their sons. After a year, the sons are a lot more aggressive than the daughters.

This means that children can really be affected by the gender stereotypes of their parents. This means that the parents also influence the toy-choices they make. Therefore these choices and the behaviour of the kids are things we, ourselves, teach our children. I believe those are NOT things that they are already born with.