A Response to Peggy Orenstein

Peggy Orenstein’s “Should the World of Toys Be Gender-Free?” asks an important question, though it seems that Ms. Orenstein fails to understand just how important. While the article suggests that toys should not encourage or promote the socialization of gender roles, it fails to recognize that these divides exist by virtue of some primordial order and that no amount of “nurture” can ever cure whatever ills may be housed in nature. In reality, boys and girls play differently and these differences are reflections of the manner in which males and females evolve differently and into different kinds of beings. Of course, there is doubtless some conditioning involved in this process, but to tamper with the natural playful inclinations of boys and girls is to conduct a dangerous experiment in interfering with the natural order of things.

When Jean Piaget wrote The Moral Judgment of the Child, much of what he studied was thought to be entirely useless. Piaget recognized that boys seemed to gravitate toward certain kinds of toys and games, such as those involving marbles and movement, whereas girls tended to avoid such games. Piaget found that boys almost invariably preferred more complex games than those preferred by their female counterparts, who primarily preferred to avoid any games that might lead to disputes about rules and guidelines (Lancy & Grove 497). Girls preferred games that involved only indirect competition and did not enjoy any games that entailed complex systems of rules, whereas boys quite enjoyed the process of adhering to these rules and then resolving any disputes regarding their adherence. As such, Piaget became fascinated by the extent to which these games seemed to reflect certain fundamental gender traits within gender groups, though not as compared against each other.

In other words, boys have historically preferred spatially involved games that require the judgment of objects in motion, as Orenstein’s article recognizes, while girls have simply not preferred these kinds of games. Of course, these preferences apply within gendered settings in which boys play with boys and girls play with girls. Once this divide is broken and integration of boys and girls into the same play-groups is achieved, these preferences begin to evolve organically, with some boys and girls preferring games or forms of play in which they had previously had no interest. Viewed in this light, Orenstein seems unable to recognize that to “neutralize” whatever gender-specific traits are housed in toys or systems of playthings is to forcefully oppose the natural evolution of the manner in which boys and girls interact from a developmental psychology perspective.

While gender-neutral toys are theoretically inconsequential, as applied to the long-term holistics of a civilized society, it cannot be proper or “right” to deprive girls of certain toys to which they are naturally drawn, examples of which Orenstein provides. If a girl cannot play with a doll-house or a Lego kitchenette, then must a boy play with these things instead? If a girl simply does not wish to engage in a game of marbles or, worse yet, cannot do so for whatever developmental reason, should she be punished at the risk of disturbing her psychological development? These are questions that would be raised by a system in which all toys and playthings were systematically calculated to be gender-neutral. In light of this, it is far wiser to continue to allow boys to boys and girls to be girls. After all, if a given boy or girl is dissatisfied with the toys in his or her possession, he or she can express this to a parent, who in turn can make an appropriate adjustment without altering the landscape of developmental interactivity.

Work Cited

Lancy, David F. and Grove, M. Annette. “Marbles and Machiavelli: The Role of Game Play in Children’s Social Development.” American Journal of Play, Vol. 3.4, 2011, 489-499.

Orenstein, Peggy. “Should the World of Toys be Gender Free?” NY Times. 29 Dec. 2011. Web.