Trying to resolve a dispute about this; Google was not immediately helpful.
Do male children in all cultures play ‘fighting games’ (cowboys and indians, gunplay, war, etc)? In essence, my question is about whether this is generally considered learned behavior (cultural) or innate.
There aren’t any that I know of. In fact, there have been many experiments where researchers or ‘enlightened’ parents have tried to train groups of boys into neutral or alternate gender typical behaviors and failed. In one failure, they tried to teach boys to take care of dolls and girls to play with girls. The girls carefully nurtured the guns and the boys catapulted the dolls at each other. Even Rhesus monkeys show gender differences in behavior. It is fairly clear that the driver is mostly nature over nurture for the genders as a whole even though it won’t apply equally to every single individual and can be modified (but not completely negated) in some cases by environment.
From the first article linked below:
“The female preference for nurturing play and the male propensity for rough-and-tumble hold cross-culturally and even cross-species (with a few exceptions—female spotted hyenas seem to be at least as aggressive as males). Among our close relatives such as vervet and rhesus monkeys, researchers have found that females play with dolls far more than their brothers, who prefer balls and toy cars. It seems unlikely that the monkeys were indoctrinated by stereotypes in a Top-Toy catalog. Something else is going on.”
I’m not at all surprised, having once had the misfortune to read what they use their clitoris for. :eek:
I think I want my ignorance un-fought…
As my four year old niece said about her 2 year old brother, “Give a boy a stick and he’ll whack a tree.” They are now both in their 20s but I don’t think her opinion has changed.
My sister tried to raise her sons without toy guns, but gave up when she realized all boys are born with 9mm fingers which they happily use as toy guns.
My son and my daughter (12 years apart) each had about an equal proportion of dolls/stuffed animals and cars/trucks. My boy would line up the dolls and run them over with the cars. My daughter would wrap the cars in blankets and tuck them next to the dolls to “sleep.”
I don’t entirely grok gender, but apparently my kids do.
When I was in high school, I had a psychology class where we had to study childhood development by working with an actual child. My subject was the boy who lived next door, who was being raised in a hippie, peace-loving, vegetarian household that forbid toy guns. That boy would turn any object he could find into a gun – a stick, a potato, a toy car, his finger (as mentioned above).
Yes, to think otherwise is just just denying reality. My educational background is in psychology and the sexual differentiation of behavioral neuroscience. The history classes on the subject teach you all about the failed and sometimes crackpot ideas that many serious researchers proposed when the science was in its infancy. Up until the 1960’s and 1970’s, there were some serious and reputable researchers who seriously believed in the tabula rasa (blank slate) theory. That states that all children without any serious developmental defects can be shaped into anything just by environment whether it is academic interest in certain subjects or core personality traits like aggressive tendencies.
They really wanted it to be true but it simply isn’t. We know now that that the correlation for certain behaviors is extremely strong among the genders in general even if it isn’t perfect among all individuals and that applies to other personality traits as well.
I was always surprised that anyone ever took such a thing seriously. Any parent like me, even those with same gender children, can tell you that they are born the way they are and you can only have a limited influence on their core personality and it starts at birth. Parents with children of different know that you can’t much about their preferences when it comes to how they use their toys or deal with other people. You can only teach them to work with their behavioral strengths once they are mature enough to understand them.
Damn, I’d forgotten how nasty hyenas were. I think I know where Star Trek got the idea for Klingon sex now.
Not the ‘gentle and untouched’ Tasaday of the Philippines… oh wait, that’s a myth… no the myth is the myth … no wait …
Whatever the truth about the Tasaday, it was clear that the anthropology student I knew, and the anthropology department that taught her, absent any direct knowledge, were deeply committed to the idea that people untouched by our unclean culture were culturally superior to us, and part of that was their lack of knowledge about fighting and conflict.
This tells us nothing about the Tasaday, but it does remind us of something about anthropologists and sociologists: the whole field is tainted by wishful thinking and preconceptions.
Your question is a valid one, but I invite you to just put it aside as unknowable.
What’s it like in cultures that eschew war, like Quakers and the Amish?
You could try looking at David Lancy’s “The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings”
I read it, but can’t remember off the top of my head if he mentioned any cultures where children do not play war games at all. I think he mentions in general that it tends to play less of a part among hunter gatherers. There is also a specific tribe where they will take the hands of two little boys, and make them slap each other. Later they reward them for fighting. Can’t remember the tribe, sorry.
Regarding the gender differences, that is not my experience at all. The children I worked with all hated dolls, they were never played with at all. We were given endless amounts of dolls in donations, and they just eerily sat on a shelf. The children only liked: bicycles, climbing trees, football and capoeira/playing vampires/playing power rangers. They also liked crafts (painting, beads, all sorts) and this was also totally unrelated to gender. These kids grow up pretty isolated from mainstream culture, which may have something to do with it. Guns are absolutely not allowed (they have real life experience of them) but this rule barely needs enforcing. The kids I work with in Romania also don’t show this gender difference: they like basketball, but the boys will just as happily play with dolls. The kids in Romania have various developmental disabilities though, so that may be influential.
I’m not saying there is no gender difference in play, just that in my experience it was insignificant compared to individual differences in preference.