Opinion How nurture becomes nature

So who has it right? Should gender be systematically expunged from playthings? Or is Lego merely being realistic,earnestly meeting girls halfway? The collection,Lego says,was based on months of anthropological research revealing that — gasp! — the sexes play differently. In order to be gender-fair,today’s executives insist,they have to be gender-specific.

As any developmental psychologist will tell you,those observations are,to a degree,correct. Human boys and girls not only tend to play differently from one another — with girls typically clustering in pairs or trios,chatting together more than boys and playing more cooperatively.

Score one for Lego,right? Not so fast. Preschoolers may be the self-appointed chiefs of the gender police,eager to enforce and embrace the most rigid views. Yet,according Lise Eliot,a neuroscientist and the author of Pink Brain,Blue Brain,that’s also the age when their brains are most malleable. Every experience,every interaction,every activity — when they laugh,cry,learn,play — strengthens some neural circuits at the expense of others,and the younger the child the greater the effect. At issue,then,is not nature or nurture but how nurture becomes nature: the environment in which children play and grow can encourage a range of aptitudes or foreclose them. So blithely indulging — let alone exploiting — stereotypically gendered play patterns may have a more negative long-term impact on kids’ potential than parents imagine.

Traditionally,toys were intended to communicate parental values and expectations,to train children for their future adult roles. Today’s boys and girls will eventually be one another’s professional peers,employers,employees,romantic partners,co-parents. How can they develop skills for such collaborations from toys that increasingly emphasise,reinforce,or even create,gender differences?

The rebellion against such gender apartheid may have begun. Consider the latest video to go viral on YouTube: ‘Riley on Marketing’ shows a little girl in front of a wall of pink packaging,asking,“Why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff and all the boys have to buy different-colour stuff?” It has been viewed more than 2.4 million times.

Perhaps,then,Hamleys is on to something,though it will doubtless meet with resistance — even rejection. As for me,I’m trying to track down a poster of a 1981 ad for a Lego “universal” building set to give to my daughter. In it,a freckle-faced girl in baggy jeans,a T-shirt and sneakers proudly holds out a jumbly,multi-hued creation. Beneath it,a tag line reads,“What it is is beautiful.”

Orenstein is the author,most recently,of ‘Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture’