When it comes to toys, there are some toys that are stereotypically “male” and others that are “female.” Tea sets and baby dolls are usually for the girls while army men and weapons are usually for the boys. Now I can hear many of you say, “There’s nothing wrong with girls playing with army men or little boy playing with dolls!” Of course girls can be caught playing with “boy” toys and boys can be caught playing with “girl” toys, and if that should happen, you're right; there is nothing wrong with that. But dance around it all you want, some toys just scream “BOY!” and others politely whisper, “girl.” There is nothing wrong with the stereotypes and there is nothing wrong with boys and girls treading into one another’s territory once in a while.
Toys, whether gender-neutral or geared for a specific gender, are meant to assist children with the world of make-believe. They are intended to foster a child’s imagination and encourage play. One of the problems we encountered with Autism early on was the fact that for Matt-Man, make-believe, imagination and play were not simply hard to come by, they were altogether non-existent. He played with toys so differently, so as to lose himself in the toy. When Nathan was turning two, he would line cars up, make them race one another and throw out the losers until only one car was left. Conversely, Matt-Man was content to sit in a corner by himself staring at the spinning wheels of a car, sometimes for hours.
Nathan would even give different voices to the different cars in order to identify which car was speaking. Matt-Man had never raced cars nor made them speak. He had never taken army men and made them fight each other. He had never pretended to drink tea or even play with dolls. For about three and a half years, he has been content with nothing more than just sitting in a corner, spinning wheels.
Slowly that has changed. A doctor told us that when Matt-Man begins stimming on something (like spinning wheels), we shouldn’t stop him from doing that, but we should engage him with whatever has his attention and try to show him a different way to play. So when we saw him spinning wheels, we started to say things like, “Is that a car? Can that car drive on your head?” We would then take the car, drive it up his arm, gently up the side of his face, and park it on top of his head. Then we all laughed when it fell off his head, but before long he was back to spinning wheels.
So perhaps you can imagine the shock Matt-Man gave us on our daughter’s first birthday. She was given the stereotypical little girl toy: a dollhouse. It came with a mommy, daddy, a baby, and some pieces of furniture. Our daughter did what most one-year old girls do when they get a new dollhouse and people—she put the baby’s head in her mouth.
What surprised us was Matt-Man’s reaction to the dollhouse. This stereotypical girl toy caught his attention. He grabbed a car (stereotypically boy) and started creating an imaginary scene with the car, first putting the car on the roof. Then, he made the dollhouse daddy say, “Hey, there’s a car on that roof! Get off the roof!” After that, he pushed the car off the roof of the dollhouse, followed by, “Uh oh! The car got an owie! Do you need a hug?” He then gave the car a big hug and said, “The car is all better.” The story kept going when he put two cars on the roof and the dollhouse quickly became a fight scene between Lightning McQueen and a dump truck.
Evidently he had been doing some of this with a teacher at school just that week. The teacher “galloped” a toy horse to Matt-Man and said in a silly voice, “Hi! What’s your name?” He answered the horse’s question in an equally silly voice. Then the two of them clip-clopped their toy horses into the sunset.
This type of play, the use of toys to foster an imagination, has been a long-time in coming. What Nathan was doing before two years old, Matthew has only begun to do just weeks before his fourth birthday. Despite the delay, this is worth celebrating! And if it takes a little girl’s dollhouse to foster this kind of play, perhaps our home will have a lot more pink toys in the future.
