The game of life!

Blue is for boys.

Pink is for girls.

Any questions?

To entertain Andrew this afternoon Wendy pulled out the board game of life. Andrew was not interested in actually playing the game. But he loved playing with the cars and the people.  He designated the roles of all the people when he placed them in the cars

MaMa's were always pink.

DaDa's were always blue. 

Additional pegs in the cars were designated "bebe" 

As I can recall we have never specifically reinforced these genderized colors for our babies. Andrew's comfort blanket is a nice pastel yellow. Somehow, he has still picked up on the color separation. He's not alone. Being a graduate student I'm constantly looking up research articles on the subjects in my classes. I might was well look something up to satisfy my own curiosity as well, right?

It appears that there has been fairly extensive research done on the gender-stereotyped color preferences and when they develop. Between the age of 2 and 3 is when children start to actively search out gender-related information (Sozuls et al., 2009). At age 2 boys choose the color pink at a rate slightly below girls. From that age forward girls show an increasing preference for pink and boys show an increasing avoidance of pink.  By age 2.5 (just six months later) girls will strongly prefer pink over blue and boys will strongly avoid pink (Lobue & DeLoache, 2011). 

They learn pretty quickly once they start looking don't they?

References:
LoBue, V., & DeLoache, J. S. (2011). Pretty in pink: The early development of gender-stereotyped colour preferences. British Journal Of Developmental Psychology, 29(3), 656-667. doi:10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02027.x

Zosuls, K. M., Ruble, D. N., Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., Shrout, P. E., Borstein, M. H., & Greulich, F. K. (2009). The acquisition of gender labels in infancy: Implications for gender-typed play. Developmental Psychology, 45, 688–701.

Photo by Liz Gray. Lizlogic.wordpress.com