[Mikell Taylor]

James, that's a really interesting question. Here are my thoughts.

I think it's less that kids want to buy gendered stuff than it is that well-meaning grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, and friends buy them for them. One of my coworkers had a daughter two years ago and he and his wife were determined to raise her without pink girliness; they bought all her clothes in non-pink colors, painted the nursery green, etc. But all their family and friends, who knew they were having a girl, bought her pink stuff. And of course they're not going to say no to gifts, or throw away perfectly good baby stuff, so this kid is wearing a lot more pink than her parents intended. At some point, will she notice that she and the other girls at preschool wear a lot of pink, and the boys wear a lot of blue, and make some conclusions about that?

As far as toys go, again, I think it has to do with outside influences. I was born around the time Cabbage Patch Kids first became popular, and my aunt was determined to get me one; my mother actually tried to convince her she didn't want me to have one. My aunt finally snuck one to me, because "I needed a doll." (My mom compromised by getting it a spacesuit outfit) I'm the oldest kid in my family, and my parents - including my mother, who was in the first class of female navigators in the Air National Guard, so she was very non-traditional - did a great job of getting me all kinds of scientific stuff to play with as a kid, but never engineering stuff -- they just didn't know about it, or what kind of toys future engineers should have. (Note that my parents DID want me to be an engineer; Mom wanted an astronaut in the family. No kidding.) I never owned my own set of LEGO. My younger brother was given LEGO by family members once he was old enough, and I kind of played with them then, but by that point -- when I was six or so -- I knew what toys I thought I liked best, so I played with and asked for those, not for the "boy" toys my brother was always given. I remember my (male) FIRST mentors being shocked that not a single girl on my team had a clue what an Erector Set was.

I was also heavily influenced by what my friends had. My best friend had a Polly Pocket? Well then obviously I must too! Granted, it sat unused in my closet for all but approximately ten minutes of my ownership of it, but I had to have it!

As a side note, I remember a commercial I saw a couple years ago -- might have been Hasbro, actually -- that showed this multi-purpose toy for boys. There were knobs and buttons and shapes and all these exciting things. The commercial actually said, "He can ride around, learn his shapes, and build things -- everything little boys need know!" or something to that effect. The equivalent girls' toy had a separate commercial I found online. There were no shapes to play with and the thing was painted pink. The commercial made no mentioned of girls needing to learn to play with shapes. That really struck me (and ticked me off, but that's a separate issue).

I'm sure there are plenty of natural influences; as I stated earlier in the thread, it's not that I believe men and women are identical and we all think the same way; we have different biological influences we're all programmed to respond to, and those trickle up to interactions in our society. But I think there's a lot of obvious socialization going on that tends to influence people one way or another, for better or for worse, and we need to understand that and how it may influence people away from opportunities everyone should have.

And I don't want to accuse parents and grandparents and whomever else of ruining kids or anything. I know everyone has the best of intentions in mind. I just think it's easy to fall into stereotypes when it's constantly being marketed to you, and it takes awareness and work to help people work outside those boxes.