The Role of Peers' Gender in Children's Naturally Occurring Interest in Toys

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to examine naturalistically the role of same-sex and other-sex peers' contemporaneous and prior attention to toys in preschoolers' subsequent engagement with, and disengagement from, non-gender-typed toys. Contemporaneous peer involvement was significantly associated with children's toy adoption; cumulative peer involvement was not significantly related to attention to toys once the effects of contemporaneous peer involvement were controlled. Both the proportion and the absolute number of same-sex peers were higher when children initially became engaged with the toys than when they were close to the toys but did not attend to them. Moreover, for boys, there were more other-sex peers attending to the toys when children ceased involvement with the toys than when they initially became interested in the toy. The implications of the data for understanding the role of peer interaction in gender-stereotypic interest in toys are discussed.

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