The Relationships of Parental Expectations and Preschool Children's Verbal Sex Typing to Their Sex-typed Toy Play Behavior

Abstract

SCHAU, CANDACE GARRETT; KAHN, LYNNE; DIEPOLD, JOHN H.; and CHERRY, FRANCES. The Relationships of Parental Expectations and Preschool Children's Verbal Sex Typing to Their Sex-typed Toy Play Behavior. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1980, 51, 266-270. Parents of 52 preschool-age children predicted how frequently their children would play with each of 12 adultdefined sex-typed and neutral toys. Each child played 10 min with the toys; 32 of the children verbally rated the toys as to sex appropriateness. Children sex-typed the toy groups in the expected cultural directions but with lower agreement than adults; younger children assigned fewer toys exclusively to the opposite sex than did older children. Girls played longer with neutral and equally long with feminine and masculine toys; boys played longer with masculine and equally long with feminine and neutral toys. With increasing age, both sexes played longer with feminine toys; no age differences were found for masculine and neutral toys. The children were highly concordant in their verbal sex typing and play; younger children played with a smaller proportion of self-defined sex-inappropriate toys, but there were no age differences in proportion of playtime spent with these toys. Parents expected their children to play with culturally defined sex-appropriate toys, but in general their predictions were not accurate.