ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1601339
The Gendered Toy Choice (GTC): Validating a Behavioral Measure of Gendered Parenting
Provisionally accepted
Noya Kislev*
Tamar Saguy- Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Gendered parenting reflects parents' tendency to promote gender-typed behaviors of their children, shaping their everyday experiences and environments. Existing research primarily relies on self-report or observational methods, limiting behavioral insights. This study introduces the development and validation of the Gender Toy Choice (GTC) measure, an unobtrusive behavioral tool assessing parents' real-time product choices for their children. In three studies conducted among Israeli and U.S. parents to preschool children, the GTC measure demonstrated face, construct, concurrent, convergent, and discriminant validity, supporting its theoretical relevance. Findings highlight how parental choices reinforce gender norms in children's daily lives and provide a standardized behavioral measure for future research. By offering a novel, easy-to-implement tool, this work contributes to the study of factors underlying parents' gendered decision-making and the mechanisms shaping gendered parenting practices .
Keywords: gendered parenting, Measurement, validity, gendered toy choice measure, Gendered behavior
Received: 27 Mar 2025; Accepted: 10 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kislev and Saguy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Noya Kislev, Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.