Shiraz Ahmed, Editor Giving Life Magazine
Girls and boys are different, right from the start, and the differences between them become more obvious in the first few months of life. For instance, baby girls often want to be touched more than baby boys and many girls can play independently earlier than boys. They also speak earlier and are more inquisitive. Later, as toddlers, girls will have better developed motor skills, allowing them to grip and hold pencils and scissors.
Nurture or Nature: What makes baby girls play with dolls?
Nurture is the main influence. Girls like to play with dolls because that’s what they’re given to play with. That’s what they see other girls playing with. That’s what society says they should play with, etc. It’s all very arbitrary from an objective perspective. If children were born into a society where girls played with building blocks, erector sets, tinker toys, legos, etc, and boys played with dolls, tea cups and plastic cooking stoves you would essentially see many gender roles reversed.
There’s nothing in anyone’s genes that predisposes them to wear skirts, put on makeup, or any other “girly” thing. These things are all arbitrary societal norms. It has everything to do with gender roles, even as a young child, little girls prepare for children by playing with dollies, pretending to be mom.
Let’s see what Hira says about her daughter. Hira is a young mom herself, teaching in the North Nazimabad branch of a famous chain of schools.
“Well I have a 4 year old daughter who loves playing with dolls. She says that she is their mommy. She picks one up, changes its clothes, brushes its hair, gives it a bath, puts it in her bed , then kisses it good night…I think she likes to play mommy to the doll and she mimics everything I do, and she treats the doll or the toy-baby the way I treat her..and that’s nice to see.”
But upbringing is not the single element which leads to a baby girl to be girlish or ‘momish’, then, what else?
Nature Acts Upon
A traditional sociological explanation is that boys and girls are socialized and encouraged to play with different types of toys by their parents, peers, and the “society.” Growing scientific evidence suggests, however, that boys’ and girls’ toy preferences may have a biological origin.
Another interesting viewpoint on the subject came from the people who work with children. They believe that girls are naturally interested in playing with dolls, while boys like building things and toy cars , therefore women have better verbal skills, while men have better spatial skills
Some experts believe that it’s just built into their biological selves. There was an experiment where they only gave little girls fire trucks and police cars. They wrapped them up in blankets and pretended they were babies or the dolls.
The argument was supported by Aly Rizvi, a young father working in a foreign bank in Islamabad. He says “The reason boys like to play with cars and trucks is because men’s brains are physically wired to be slightly better than women’s at manipulating geometrical shapes (thus, when we’re young, we like to play with things that move). That’s also why boys learn better when figures are drawn on the black-or-white-boards, whereas girls learn better from oral communication (their brains are physically wired to be slightly better at verbal communication than boys’). A number of people whose parents tried to raise them liberally know that this is a nature issue, and not a nurture one. My parents tried to get me to play with girls’ toys and I wasn’t interested, while my sister automatically picked up the dolls when we were just given a chest full of girls’ and boys’ toys to play with.”
However, it is becoming less and less likely that “gender socialization” is the reason why boys and girls prefer different toys, and it is more and more likely that there are some genetic, hormonal, and other biological reasons for the observed sex differences in toy preferences.