Toys are the most frivolous things in the world and, in some ways, the most essential. No culture is entirely without toys; where mass-produced and mass-marketed toys are absent, children transform everyday objects into games, puzzles, and imagined friends and enemies. Toys can be objects of solitary attention and entertainment or, far more often, centerpieces of social interaction.
Over the past century, toys have become the focus of a massive industry, the opening wedge for the commoditization of childhood, icons of cultural controversy, subjects of serious (and not-so-serious) scholarship, and sometimes even tools for psychological research.
Today’s toys are freighted with meanings, many of them far heavier than any plaything should have to bear. As researcher and author Brian Sutton-Smith asserts in his books Toys as Culture and The Ambiguity of Play, toys mean many different things to many different people. When those meanings rub up against each other, they produce heated controversies: over Barbie’s waist size, G.I. Joe’s guns, or the propriety of prostitution in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
As a result, toys have become high-stakes playthings. They provide children with fun and fantasy while teaching hard-edged social norms; they promise parents peace of mind while bringing the chaos of popular consumer culture into the home; they produce massive profits for multinational conglomerates whose public relations offices promise to put the child’s interests first. To this whirlpool of conflicting interests and ideas, psychological scientists have added a few drops of their own.
Child’s Play If it is true that no one ever steps into the same river twice, it is also true that no child ever plays with the same toy more than once. As the child grows, the play changes; and as the play changes, the toy is transformed.
Some psychologists have argued — controversially — that boys’ and girls’ preferences for certain kinds of play are driven by hormonal differences, and that socialization plays a relatively minor role. Gerianne Alexander, a psychologist at Texas A&M University who has published several studies linking toy preferences to prenatal androgen levels, has reported that vervet monkeys show gendered preferences for human toys: female vervets tend to spend more time in contact with dolls, while male vervets tend to spend more time playing with trucks.
Regardless of the roots of gendered toy preferences, it is clear that toys and toy advertising have powerful effects on the ways children construct their gender identities. Girls between the ages of five to eight who are exposed to Barbie dolls feel worse about their bodies than girls exposed to dolls with more realistic physiques, according to a recent study by University of Sussex psychologist Helga Dittmar and her colleagues published in Developmental Psychology.
Boys, of course, are influenced by toys as well. In a recent paper in the journal Sex Roles, Jennifer Pike and Nancy Jennings reported that boys tended to be particularly strongly influenced by gendered aspects of television advertising. If boys saw an advertising in which only girls were playing with a particular toy, they were much less likely to play with that toy when given the opportunity.
Whether children play with boys’ or girls’ toys has significant effects for the nature of their play, says Isabelle Cherney, a developmental psychologist at Creighton University. Cherney and her colleagues have found that female-stereotyped toys tend to promote the most complex play in 18 to 47 month-olds. But as children grow older, their gendered stereotypes about toys grow stronger. Boys, especially, become increasingly likely to avoid playing with "girl toys," possibly for fear of social repercussions from their peers.
On the other hand, "both strongly feminine and strongly masculine toys seem to be associated with the worst aspects of gender roles: i.e., a focus on appearance in girls and violence in boys," says Blakemore, who is currently conducting further research on parents’ attitudes about gender-typed toys and their own children.
The purchase of a toy is not, of course, the end of a parents’ involvement in how the toy is used and perceived by the child. A toy is ultimately nothing more than an opportunity for play, and parents are constantly encouraging, constraining, and participating in the play of their children.
Toy-Makers Today It’s not just parents, educators, and psychologists who care about the psychology of children’s play. Toy marketers and designers care too — and not just when they are building and selling so-called "educational" toys.
In fact, says Stanford University psychologist Barbara Tversky, most researchers working at the intersection of toys and psychology are probably in industry. Toy designer Barry Kudrowitz, a graduate student at MIT who has developed toys for Hasbro, says familiarity with children’s psychology is critical to toy design, even though many toy designers lack formal training in psychology. "Before brainstorming, the designer should know what types of behaviors are typical for that age group, what media properties are popular; the social, mental, and physical abilities of the age group; and what types of play are most common," says Kudrowitz.
Perhaps expectations for what toys can do to children, for better or worse has been overblown. Play theorist Sutton-Smith has criticized psychological research on play for what he sees as its "thinly disguised rationalistic and moralistic concern with the way parents socialize their children into higher levels of complexity." Sutton-Smith wants to remind us that not all play has a function, not all toys are educational, and not all interactions between parents and children necessarily aim to produce productive members of society. Sometimes they’re just fun
Etienne Benson
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer
