I. Sege Resources

IMPLICATIONS

• What do you see as the relationship of toys to a culture? Do you agree with the writer that living role models are more influential in the life of children than their toys?
• How do you see the fact that girls tend to grow up liking to play different games than boys do?
• Why do you suppose boys seem to gravitate toward violent toys and games? Do boys see this being modeled anywhere? On television? On videos? Video games? Is it healthy to allow a child to play with assault guns and violent toys? Is it healthy for a child to play with dolls? Do you think it is important for children to explore relationships in play? How might a child be disadvantaged if never encouraged to explore relationships in play?

1. As we seek to drop gender-role stereotyping, it is important not to lose what is healthy and essential in child play.
2. Although individuals grow in different ways, there is a place for girls and boys to play with the same toys and then to have some freedom in making their own gender-specific choices of games, dolls, and toys.
3. Vicarious role-playing through the "Little People" of dolls is an invaluable and safe way for children to explore who they are in relationships. In a world where interpersonal relationships are more and more difficult to foster and maintain, we need to help children enjoy the benefits of role-playing with dolls and inside-the-home play.

Sege, I. (1994, December 15). Don’t do away with dolls. The Boston Globe.

OVERVIEW

At Christmas time, child experts advise parents on beneficial and harmful toys. Toys that hurt and that encourage violence or gender stereotyping are to be avoided. The writer sees a possible danger here:

The flip side of explicitly telling boys not to play war seems to be implicitly telling girls not to play house, the most antisocial aspects of boys’ play perversely equated, unintentionally I imagine, with the most social aspect of girls’ play.

One list compiled by three experts for The Boston Globe included 30 toys: eight building toys, six art projects, three games, and no dolls. Another expert says that all young children "love cars, planes, and trucks." This expert explicitly recommends "blocks, art supplies and construction toys" but passes over dolls.

When "experts" tell parents to avoid the purchase of toys that encourage sex-role stereotypes, somehow dolls and toys that foster relationships are included in the exile. Irene Sege observes that these "experts" group both guns and violent toys with dolls and tea-sets in the same category of sex-role stereotyping toys—and that is a mistake.

As experts encourage parents to buy gender-free toys, people quickly nod that it is time to do away with assault weapon toys and violent video games, i.e., games of war for boys.

Of the toys that the writer mentions that re-create real life—miniature gas stations, garages and farms—none of them come from real life inside a home. Sege observes that within the traditional view that boys build and girls relate that there sure is a lot of building going on—at the expense of relating. It is not that the writer does not approve of construction sets and games and pretend farms for girls. But she says her list would also include dolls and fake food and tea sets, "because children playing house are playing roles that, for boys as well as girls, are every bit as important in adult life as roles outside the home."

"Playing house teaches important lessons about cooperation and nurturing and responsibility and relationships that are as much a part of a whole, healthy child as the creativity she learns from art and the competence she builds with construction toys." Sege’s conclusion is provocative:

The real lesson here is that as important as toys are, they are not nearly as important as the culture that spawned them. What my daughters see when they see me, not what toys they use, is ultimately how they will learn to be women.

One of the gender-stereotyped messages played out in their play is that girls and women value relationships. The burden of challenging the persistence of sex-role stereotypes in toys is not only to push girls toward blocks and trucks, to also to open the wonderful world of dolls and playing house to boys.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION