Saturday, April 01, 2006

Boys & their toys

I know there's this big PC push to let your kids play with gender neutral toys, or in fact to encourage them to play with toys traditionally associated with the opposite gender, in order to broaden their horizons and not sterotype them and all that good stuff. But lately I've been thinking that it's not we as a society that pushes the favouring of certain types of toys onto our kids; the kids themselves have an innate attraction to certain things. Liam is crazy about cars, trucks, and all other manner of wheeled vehicles (here he is demonstrating said craziness with a train). Now that he can crawl, and crawl with something in hand, he spends hours crawling about, rolling a car or truck or train (as the case may be) along in front of him, and making this grimace, and a flukeishly appropriate noise that almost sounds like he's mimicking an engine, along with it.
The kid has dolls and stuffed animals, and he likes those fine, but the vehicles... he seems to love them. So if he wants to spend all the livelong day playing with boy toys, so be it. Far be it from me to deny him the fun.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sydney too prefers cars, trucks & trains to dolls. This weekend at a friends, the first toy she was drawn to was the "Thomas" trains. Only time will tell, but I am not sure that I have a "girly" girl on my hands.