It is no exaggeration to say that my two-year-old son is obsessed with trucks. And cars. And buses. And trains.
I did not consciously encourage—or discourage—the uninhibited joy he finds in motor vehicles. One day he was toddling around with his favorite Llama-Llama-Red-Pajama doll and the next we were awash in toy cars.
The transformation began last fall. At 22 months old, he discovered some mini Tonka cars at the bottom of a toy bin and realized, to his delight, he could roll them along the wood floor of our apartment with his little hands firmly atop. Around the same time, his language exploded out of nowhere in both English and Italian (the languages we speak at home). Car! Macchina! Truck! Camion! Train! Treno! We were thrilled he was finally speaking and met his naming of each moving hunk of metal with smiles and kisses.
Oh, he’s such a boy, family and strangers alike would say. I would shrug and smile. But I wondered. What biological imperative could possibly make a boy like trucks more than girls do? There had to be more to the story.
Then one day I noticed my niece—who is six months younger than my son but more precocious—crawling around pushing a little toy car under her chubby, olive-skinned hand.
See? I thought. All little kids are fascinated by moving vehicles, not just boys. (No wonder the scourge that is Wheels on the Bus is such an enduring favorite among tots. Just shoot me now and get it over with.)
But what happened next created an irreversible difference in trajectory between my son, whose best day ever was when we took him to the Brooklyn Transit Museum, and his cousin, who much prefers Dora the Explorer.
In December, my son turned two, and Christmas soon followed. Everyone we knew seized on the biological fact that he was a boy plus the anecdotal evidence that he liked trucks and, in a grand, coordinated gesture of confirmation bias, showered us with toy vehicles of every color, shape and size. Because boys like trucks. Never mind that this boy also likes animals (especially dogs and monkeys), Pocoyo, Elmo, Play-doh, building towers, doing puzzles and generally putting ‘things’ in other ‘things’. His cousin, to my knowledge, received no cars or trucks of any kind for Christmas.
I can hear the revolt playing out in your head. I never pushed my son to like cars. I never told my daughter not to play with trucks.
Okay, fine. Maybe there is a love of trains genetically programmed into the Y chromosome. Or a truck-brainwashing molecule swirling in the testosterone that bathes our boy babies in utero. Or an as-yet undiscovered evolutionary advantage conferred upon men who obsess over cars. Maybe.
Or maybe, just maybe, the cultural norms assigning blue trucks to boys and pink dolls to girls are so pervasive, so ingrained in what we believe makes sense, so reflected in our own subconscious actions, decisions and pastimes that we do not even notice it is happening. As Lauren Apfel quipped in a comment on her recent Brain, Child essay, perhaps “the baby girl dressed head-to-toe in pink from the minute she is born, who, surprise, surprise, comes to think pink is the only color for her” is not so astonishing after all. Even a parent who makes a point of being gender neutral in clothing and toys will be confronted, unavoidably, with a tsunami of societal cues designed to sort and box our preferences with a big pink, or blue, bow.
Maybe it is inevitable, after all, that boys love trucks. Just not biologically preordained.
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