"Lorries are for boys"

[Ketayuzu]

My 2.5yr old DD said that this morning while putting on her new top (covered in lorries, diggers and cranes). She'd only put it on when I pointed out the tractor (aparently tractors are different)
I don't know where it's come from- she loves lorries (we frequently are late for nursery when any lorry is loading or unloading near our house as she won't get in the car until its all finished. )
She loves dolls too and plays with them lots at nursery i know.
Apart from me and her dad she's only really left alone at nursery so it must have come from there. I don't want to be 'that mum' but should I mention it??

My 2.5 yo said this week 'when I'm bigger I'll have a digger and I'll be a boy!'

I always love it when people claim that boys liking toys like cars, lorries and trains more than girls is biologically ingrained. Ah yes, it must be from the close and intimate relationship that stone age males had with the internal combustion engine...

As HanutaQueen says long distance Clara might have something to say about that! (I wanted to be a lorry driver because of her when I was little). I think at this age they start picking up things from peers, other adults and society e.g. advertising. All you can do is try to balance a bit. by talking at home and giving access to wide variety of stuff. We spent a while looking at pictures of Grayson Perry and Arabian men in traditional dress this morning after my son came out with boys can't wear certain things. My girl loves pink and dresses but happy to do wide variety of activities so I don't care - I would worry if she started saying certain careers were for boys etc.

My kids hear this quite a lot given we live in the Middle East (always from kids/adults from South East Asia). I've always said "don't be silly all toys are for boys or girls" or "Both boys and girls can wear pink/blue".

DD 4.5 & DS 6 have a range of traditionally boys or girls toys and play with them interchangeably. The favorites are any of the animal and dinosaur toys and the play house & furniture (Currently Mummy T-Rex and Daddy velocoraptor are raising a family of tiger cubs and a killer whale in the house). They have a lorry that drives the family around. Both DC's are sporting blue nail polish this week as well (color picked by DD).

The only thing I'm trying to politely not do in terms of gender stereotypes is give into DD's request to shave her head. We shaved DS's due to a lice outbreak (and the fact that the nits were the same color as his hair so were impossible to find), and now she is begging for me to do the same to her. It's tempting as her curls are a pain, but they are so cute too. I'm torn.

Ah yes, it must be from the close and intimate relationship that stone age males had with the internal combustion engine...

That is a facetious remark. Of course we did not evolve with machinery. However, in hunter-gatherer societies most hunting (and nearly all warfare/fighting) is conducted by men, which is likely to be connected with the fact that men and boys universally are more likely to display an interest in tools/weapons, in things that look like tools and weapons, in inanimate objects (as opposed to people-type things like dolls) and in objects which are about physically manipulating and moving objects.

Even among extremely young babies, there are subtle on-average differences between males and females in terms how interested they are at gazing at faces versus spinning objects, for example.

To give an analogy, most people like ice cream, and that desire is linked with our biology, but of course that doesn't mean that anyone is trying to claim that we actually had ice cream in hunter gatherer societies! It means that we have evolved tastes for lipid-rich and sweet foods due to seeking out sweet and fatty flavors in our traditional environment, and this leads us to like ice cream once it is invented.

I repeat, none of this is a reason for deny or push certain types of toys. My daughter has always been given various types of toys, including cars and trucks and construction kits and all that, and encouraged to try all of them. Every individual is unique, not everyone is gender conforming, and it's good to challenge oneself and try out things that don't initially seem appealing in any case.

Ah yes, it must be from the close and intimate relationship that stone age males had with the internal combustion engine...

Is it a facetious remark? You often see on thread like this references to that largely discredited study where male chimps apparently “naturally” gravitated to trucks and wheeled objects, while the females played with the frying pans etc. It makes no sense because chimps neither cook nor drive cars.

My dad was an engineer. He loved taking things apart. I do too. I do all the fixing stuff and diy in our house because a) i learned it from my dad, and b) dh just doesn’t have the natural ability to see mechanics like i do. When my child was 2 i found her with a screwdriver taking her groclock apart to see how it worked. My sister liked history and english like my mum. So does her son.

X- related genetics? Or just genetics? Or just copying mum and dad roles?

Actually, I don't think it's facetious. The analogy with ice cream doesn't work, because the body has a clear and known mechanism by which it reacts to fat and sugar, even if in unfamiliar forms. The mechanism by which a person who has never seen one before recognises a lorry as a 'tool' is far less clear. If people said 'toys with moving parts' it would make more sense (though I think is still pretty dubious), but the idea that boy babies inherently recognise cars and lorries as 'tools' is ridiculous.

"However, in hunter-gatherer societies most hunting (and nearly all warfare/fighting) is conducted by men, which is likely to be connected with the fact that men and boys universally are more likely to display an interest in tools/weapons, in things that look like tools and weapons, in inanimate objects (as opposed to people-type things like dolls) and in objects which are about physically manipulating and moving objects."

a couple of issues with this:

In hunter-gatherer societies, hunting is often a very small part of life, done more for ritual purposes than to actually sustain life, so it's difficult to see how evolution could have played a major part here. (remember, the hinge of evolution is that not having X makes you unable to reproduce)

Lots of gathering activities (some of them performed mainly by females) also require tools: for instance, termite-gathering, fishing, clothes production.

To actual hunter-gatherers, the whole idea that hunting is focused on inanimate objects would probably be incomprehensible anyway: everything we know about anthropology suggests that it is very much seen as being about a relationship with a living creature.

In many traditional early agricultural communities (e.g. in West Africa), the heavy work of farming, which requires tools, has mainly been performed by women, while politics and history (which are people-focused are the domain of men.