Personally, I was always surprised at the difference in play between my boys and girls, even at VERY early ages. You can see the differences at under a year old, even if you are attempting to balance for societal pressures. I've spoken to enough parents who have experienced the same thing to firmly believe it is more than anecdotal.
By the age of three, she had all but insisted that we buy her pink clothes and girlier toys, to which we of course caved (I mean, if she wants it, so be it -- we just weren't trying to influence.)
She's a smart kid, and she's into plenty of non-girl things (She's currently training mixed martial arts at the age of 8, and loves playing in the mud) -- but her school wardrobe almost entirely consists of decidedly non-boy attire, and her field hockey and lacrosse sticks are pink.
We weren't exactly TRYING to steer her away from it, and it was by no means an experiment on our part, we just didn't want to predispose her to girlie things without provocation, so it's in no way scientific -- but we definitely didn't steer her.
That said, we weren't doing anything in particular to keep her away from commercials, or limiting social interactions from her peers or anything, so there really wasn't much of a 'control' group whatsoever.
The whole exercise seemed like an utterly pointless endeavor to everybody else...boys will generally find kinetic ways of expressing themselves, girls will generally find non-kinetic but more social ways -- prompting or no prompting.
Most surprising is watching my female cousins and nieces grow up, several of whom were quite physically active (doing more kinetic type play activities, climbing, wrestling, etc.) until 5 or 6 when they all very quickly toned that part of their activity patterns and started upping their social patterns. I think this had to do with their development of more complex speech patterns.
Five or six is when kids typically enter kindergarten in America, where cultural influences from others abound. I don't know what the right explanation is, but I wouldn't discount culture.
Excatly. I am very wary of the whole "we were gender neutral with our kids and then the girl wanted a pink dress SO PINK MUST BE HARD-WIRED!" argument. I am pretty sure if we took a human child to a planet where boys wore pastels and girls wore primary colours and that is what the shops had, that is what the characters on TV advertised, that is what the kids in the playground wore - the girl wouldn't turn around and say "You know what someone should invent? A pink dress!".
You only have to look at historical non-western cultures - if you look at some of the African Tribes, men and women dress in bright primary colours. In India, gold, green and red dominate. If you look at historical Japanese kimonos, you see black and red and purple and gold and so on.
So, if pink for girls is cultural, and you didn't promote it to your kids, somebody else did. And they are passing all sorts of other messages too. You can't raise a kid in a box.
That doesn't prove all gender preferences are cultural, but color choice certainly seems to be.
Interestingly, he was home-schooled until about 9 (when his parent ultimately realized that it's actually not possible to absolutely isolate a child from the world and have them grow up healthy and well adjusted), so it's not like he was getting alot of this from other kids.
In general though, I think it's too easy to simplify things to "girls go with pink and dolls" and "boys go with blue and guns". I think it's far more likely to be "boys tend to go towards kinetic play as they grow older" and "girls tend to go more towards social play as they grow older"...and I think this appears to hold true cross culturally and I don't think it has a lot to do with social expectations. At least in my family, there's a pretty concerted effort to play with the masses of kids in the same games and pretty equally.
But of course. This is exactly what ojbyrne said at the beginning of the thread: "parents underestimating the influence of society vs their own influence".
So are you saying the color pink is genetically programmed?
I mean, observing something general like being more cooperative versus more competitive could lend credence to the idea that some behaviors are genetically predisposed. Observing her say she wants to be like Barbie would lend credence to her watching and understanding more Barbie commercials than you imagine.
I have almost no doubt that it was a societal influence, it just took us for a loop, as it definitely hadn't come from us. Even saying that sounds somewhat insincere though, as it wasn't as though we were avoiding fairly traditional gender roles ourselves, but Mrs. Melton has absolutely no predisposition to wearing pink.