>> He ran around the backyard using sticks as guns.

> Since sticks (in nature) have none of the function of guns, this is certainly a learned behaviour from social observation.

Certainly part of it, but I'd bet if you gave the girl a stick to play with, she'd probably start doing something like pretending it was a baby. The specific behaviors are learned, but the preferences may not be.

I suspect that if you manged to raise some boys and girls a a completely gender neutral environment without those social influences, they'd spontaneously invent primitive and somewhat disorganized versions of the same behaviors (sort of like with language, e.g. a critical mass of deaf children will spontaneously invent a sign language together if they're not taught one).

If your claim is that gender differentiated behaviour in children is spontaneously observed due only to nature, why do you need to invent an example? You've never seen a girl play with a stick like it's a baby, because that's not a thing that girls typically do (I doubt you can find a single example of this).

Girls treat the outdoors generally the same as boys do, and iirc are recorded climbing trees in the same numbers.

How about a chimpanzee? The young females have been observed to use sticks as dolls, playing with them like babies. The young males tend to use sticks as tools and weapons.

IMHO, this ends the argument.

The article that I'm reading claims that boy chimps like to play with toy trucks: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/101220-chi...

You're gonna therefore have to explain to me why you think this is natural behaviour. Since, as I understand, trucks were invented by humans.

Isn't it just that chimpanzees are social and have been cued by human expectations, their captors and immediate relatives?

I have ABSOLUTELY seen many young girls (3-7 yo) playing with sticks or similar objects as if they are babies / dolls.

In communist Romania of my youth, where toys were sparse.

In Egypt nowadays, in poor families who can't pay for toys.

>Certainly part of it, but I'd bet if you gave the girl a stick to play with, she'd probably start doing something like pretending it was a baby.

Do you have children?

Two genders can observe the same thing, but attach different levels of importance to the observation, and have different preferences for imaginative play based on what they’ve observed.

Or identify with who they've seen do things in different ways.

Before self identification, there might be external expectations and cues. Survival of children depend on picking up cues of parents, and then peers.

Any two people will certainly attach different levels of importance to what they observe, I agree.

Given that this behaviour was learned by observation, society's existing gender norms - and specifically those around guns - would also have been observed and learned. We can't separate these, in this anecdote.

Would we not expect to observe the son to engage with more caring play if the stay-at-home parent (primary carer) had been the dad?