Fun 4 Everyone: Toys for Girls AND Boys

Click here to read TDmonthly´s Top 10 Most Wanted: Toys_for_Girls&Boys_for_the_Holiday_Season

It is a well-known fact that toys are an important part of any child’s development. According to the National Toy Council, boys and girls play differently and usually prefer different toys. It has been said that if you give footballs to a group of girls and dolls to a group of boys, the girls would be nursing the footballs and the boys would be kicking the dolls within an hour. These gender differences begin early in life and are lasting.

Because boys are usually more physically active than girls, they prefer active, noisy play, and girls have a tendency to lean toward more social and passive forms of play. Boys are attracted by action and sound effects and creating things, so video games often appeal to them. While boys and girls share many play interests and activities, including puppets, painting, games, puzzles, and modeling clay, biological differences cause the two sexes to drift toward different selections in toys. As a result, toy manufacturers package and market many toys "for boys" or "for girls". A pink pony is marketed to girls, while an army truck is marketed to boys.

A 1998 study by Dr. Fern Johnson and Karren Young sums up this trend: "From a marketing perspective, it is … more profitable for producers of children´s toys to create separate toys for boys and girls as a way of placing more items in the marketplace." However, today’s experts are advising parents to avoid choosing toys that push their children too strongly into gender-typical behavior.

As a result, retailers are now marketing toys that are fun for both sexes. The list below shows our top ten choices for toys for both boys and girls. To see the ten toys, click on the link below. These are amongst the top-selling toys at many stores, including Wal-Mart, Amazon.com and Toys R Us, according to the companies’ respective Web sites.

Click here to read TDmonthly´s Top 10 Most Wanted: Toys_for_Girls&Boys_for_the_Holiday_Season