Should children's toys be gendered?

Gender-specific toys harm childhood development

Question: Should children's toys be gendered?
Position‹2 of 2: No, toys should not be gendered
Argument1 of 3›: Gender-specific toys harm childhood development

By prescribing certain toys to only one gender, we limit children's holistic development.

The argument

There is considerable evidence suggesting that playing with toys contributes significantly to a child's development. In order to grow holistically, a child must be able to play with a wide range of toys, appealing to five areas of development- cognitive, social and emotional, speech and language, fine motor skill, and gross motor skill development. By prescribing certain toys to one gender, manufacturers limit a child's opportunity for complete developmental progress through play. If boys play with "masculine" toys exclusively, they will miss out on the valuable language and imaginative skills cultivated by dolls, kitchenware, and dress up games. Similarly, girls must use construction and other action-oriented toys to develop fine motor skills. We should not market toys to particular genders, because playing with both "boy" and "girl" toys is crucial to holistic development.

Premises

[P1]Holistic childhood development requires play across cognitive, social-emotional, language, and motor skill domains. [P2] Different toys cultivate different developmental skills, with so-called 'girl' toys building language and imagination and 'boy' toys building motor and spatial skills. [P3] Gendered marketing restricts children to a subset of toys, depriving them of the developmental benefits of the others. [C] Therefore, children's toys should not be gendered.

Counter-arguments

We need not discontinue the production of gendered toys to solve this problem. It is entirely possible to produce gendered toys that contribute to all five areas of child development. If gendered toys are not contributing holistically to child development, we must create toys that remedy this issue.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] The counter denies that gendered marketing and developmental breadth are incompatible, holding that it is entirely possible to produce gendered toys contributing across all the areas of child development. [Rejecting C] The remedy therefore does not follow from the problem: on this account where gendered toys fail to contribute holistically the answer is to design toys that do, rather than to stop making gendered toys at all.