Purely cultural, huh? You don’t say.
I know parents just like Conan O’Brien and Anna Faris who raise their kids in very progressive, forward thinking homes, and they still get the same result: most of the boys end up liking trucks and most of the girls end up liking dolls. The fact of the matter is that you can expose kids to whatever you want but there’s no guarantee that it’ll stick.
My dad is a hardcore Yankees fan that’s been writing his own amateur baseball almanacs since the 80s. All throughout my childhood, he tried to get me into baseball but it never rubbed off on me. Neither did basketball, which all my friends played everyday after school.
However, when I immigrated to the United States with my family at the age of 4, the first toy I owned was an NES. I was completely enamored by it, and no matter how hard my parents tried to wean me off of it, I’ve been a fan of videogames all my life. When I was 8, I saw my first kung fu movie. After that, I begged my father to take me to the market whenever we were in Chinatown so I could finish my collection of Once Upon A Time In China. We moved around a lot but wherever I found myself, I tried to take classes on any martial arts I could find: Tae Kwon Do, kendo, capoeira, boxing, Muay Thai, literally anything being offered in the surrounding area.
My parents didn’t encourage any of these hobbies.
So yes, I definitely think nature is at work with nurture when we talk about hobby preferences. I don’t think boys will be boys and girls will be girls is a purely cultural construct because I was once a kid and I know lots of parents of kids.
Does that mean I believe we’re completely, rigidly hardwired? Of course not. You will always have outliers. I’d absolutely expose my kids to all kinds of media and hobbies regardless of their sex. I’d love to have a daughter that’s into Muay Thai and videogames, but just because I expose her to it doesn’t mean she’ll like it, and that’s totally fine, too.
