Gender-specific toys harm childhood development

The argument

There is considerable evidence suggesting that playing with toys contributes significantly to a child's development, and that is why marketing them by gender does harm. The argument begins with what play is for. 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. These areas are not interchangeable. A child who is well served in three of them is not thereby compensated in the other two, because each is built by a different kind of activity and each has to be practised on its own terms. Different toys cultivate different areas, which is what makes the sorting consequential. 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 — the toys that require a child to invent a situation, assign roles and speak through them. Similarly, girls must use construction and other action-oriented toys to develop fine motor skills, which are built by manipulating objects rather than by talking about them. The harm therefore does not depend on any individual purchase being wrong. It follows from the aggregate effect of a marketing practice that reliably steers each child toward one half of the available range and away from the other, so that the gaps are the same gaps for every child of that gender. We should not market toys to particular genders, because playing with both "boy" and "girl" toys is crucial to holistic development.

Premises

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.