Roots of Math in Preschool Play Activities: Gender Still Does Matter

Abstract

The main activity in the preschool period is play, which stimulates development in cognitive, social, motor and identity areas. Play and toys contribute to gender socialisation - by the means of play, children form and present their notion of gender structure of the society and their position in it. The gender polarization of play activities brings long-term consequences for children performance, achievements and interests in different areas. One of the effects can be the quit low womens inclination toward mathematical and technical fields in adolescence and adulthood (despite of more equal talents for such areas distributed among girls and boys). Therefore it is important to pay attention to early childhood experience with toys and play activities associated with math and construction. Paper presents the study including 453 preschool boys and girls who were observed during playing and interviewed. The real preference of toys, verbalized preference of toys and gender labeling of toys were compared. The results show that preschool children consider toys as deep gendered artefacts. The gender borderline creates cars and dolls. The ways how children play with those toys are discussed with regard to development of mathematical and technical skills. Toys are material objects, but they are also representations of social and cultural practices (6). It brings two impacts. Firstly, children learn through play the concepts of femininity and masculinity (what covers being a girl/woman and a boy/man). Secondly, children are engaged in certain play activities, associated with their gender. Toys thus have a double role - they are means of expressing the child's gender and they are at the same time a tool of gender socialization (1). In other words, toys serve the purpose of both forming and performing the gender identity. Many western studies show that toys featuring an element of action, technical mechanical construction are considered appropriate for boys and are also preferred by boys are, while toys based care and aesthetics are associated with girls (3). These associations are based gender stereotypes and thus have socio-cultural nature. Recent study of spontaneous play in preschool age found that girls significantly preferred pretend play (f.e. play on flower shop or medical doctors) while boys favored constructive play as LEGO (7). There are long-term consequences in many ways of those gender differences in play offers and play activities in preschool age. One effect implies the deeper boysinterest in mathematical and technical field which is followed with better achievements in those areas and higher subjective competence. Longitudinal study made by Wolfgang et al. (8) shows the high correlation between playing with LEGO (as typical constructive activity in age 3 and 4) and math performance in seventh grade and later. Moreover, the consequences can be neurobiological as well (9). Regarding the plasticity of brain, the longtime and frequent exposition of certain play activity can bring the change in neurological functioning. Thus, specific brain center (f.e. responsible for visual-spatial abilities) can be developed more than others