How do parents decide which toys to buy for their children?
Who are the parents who buy more technical toys?
In our society there is a very strong stereotype about the kind of toys our children should play with. Females play with dolls, males play with soldiers and cars. While this was more accentuated in the past, there is still a strong orientation toward the idea of gender biased toys. Not only, but in recent years we have seen an increase in the number of technical toys sold.
In an interesting study conducted by Eisenberg-Berg and colleagues in 1982, it was found that while children attribute sex-specific toy choice preferences to other children, they were more interested in the functionalities of the toy when thinking about themselves. Given children interest toward technical toys, one may wonder what is the adoption rate of such toys and what are the factors that influence technical toy buying. This is exactly what has been tested by Lange-Küttner, Korte and Stamuoli in a paper recently published in Frontiers in Psychology.
The current study
The authors recruited hundred and sixty parents and non-parents (N=160, 80 males, 80 females) to take part in their study. Participants were first asked to complete the Adult Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) questionnaire, a tool used to screen for autistic traits, and then engaged in toy choice task. In this task, participants were presented with three types of toys — social (e.g dolls), educational (e.g musical instrument) , and technical (e.g Lego bricks) — and asked whether they would buy that toy for their child.
Collected data were analyzed using a 2 (parent sex) × 4 (children status: non-parent, boys only, girls only, boy and girl) by 3 (toy choice: social, educational, technical) multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA).
Results
Results showed that female adults are more likely to select social toys, as compared to technical toys, for their children, while both non-parents and parents of male children selected more technical and educational toys over social toys. Finally, for what concerns the role of parents’ autistic traits on toys selection, results revealed that parents with higher Autistic Quotient (AQ) were more likely to select technical toys, as compared to both educational and social toys.
Results of Lange-Küttner’s work demonstrate that not only AQ influence toy selection, but also parents exposure toward only male vs only female or both males and females children affects their toys selection. Overall, results show an interesting pattern of toys selection, that reflect parents real-life economical and caregiving behavior.
I hope you liked this article. If you did, please leave us a clap, while if you have any comments let us know below the article. Are you a parent? What toys do you buy for your kids? Thank you for reading it so far, and we can’t wait to see you again for the next Pills of Psy.
Source
Lange-Küttner, C., Korte, M. A., & Stamouli, C. (2019). Parents’ Autistic Personality Traits and Sex-Biased Family Ratio Determine the Amount of Technical Toy Choice. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02101
