play than girls, while Benenson (1993) found some evidence that males proffered group interaction more than females. There were many sex differences when children's play with toys was observed. Pellegrini and Perimutter (1989), found that boys preferred to play with blocks, while girls played in art areas more frequently than boys. Girls prefer female-typical toys more than boys and vise versa (Turner, et al., 1993). Also, boys liked "sex-appropriate" toys more and "sex-inappropriate" toys less than girls. A possible explanation for this is that when parents are playing with their children, it was found that they spent the least amount of time with feminine toys, regardless of the gender of the parent or child (Idle, et al., 1993). Boys were observed mixing positive and negative interactions more frequently than girls (Hinde et al., 1993). It was also discovered, that sex role flexibility was positively related to boys' prosocial behaviour (Doescher & Sugawara, 1990). Both cases agree that these findings probably resulted due to the fact that adults tend to treat girls and boys differently and that this is probably contributes to differences in gender development. Discussion According to recent literature, many sec differences occur in play in preschoolers. Sex differences occur in many different aspects of play. For example, the size of the groups that children play in differs with a function of sex (Benenson, 1993). This study found that girls prefer dyadic interaction, but fails to find out why this was the case. One possible reason for this is that because males generally have a grater activity level, this dyadic interaction is less interesting for them than for females. Also, the puppeteers in this study were female. Future research should be conducted to determine the effects of the puppeteer. More studies should also be conducted to determine if this sex difference is genetic, or learned. Possibly this could be done by conductin...
