the media and mass information), advertising, the democratization of information technologies, changes in lifestyle and styles of consumption, the new understanding of family and family structuring, and the prevailing individualism as a social value. Boys and girls are exposed to other socialization agents from outside their reference society, and access other cultural features and other discourses and worldviews that can influence them.

From this perspective, we consider that advertising and, especially, toy adverts are part of this process of the overall socialization of the child and that they contribute to perpetuating social constructions and values and generating models for socio-emotional relationships between its family members (Arconada, 1998). Specifically, this article focuses on studying toy adverts whose target audience consists of children (Johnson & Young, 2002; Martínez, Nicolás & Salas, 2013).

Among studies prior to the present one, with similar objectives, we find those that investigate the discursive construction of identity and social representation of parents in advertising discourses (Nichols, Nixon and Rowsell, 2009) to recognise in the environment of the child and its sociability, both in commercial advertising and in government-promoted institutional adverts. These authors note that parents are not represented in adverts for educational and other types of toys, whereas they are in institutional advertising. Thus, in toy advertising it is not unusual to find adverts in which just the child appears with the toy, without interacting with any children or adults, and even in which just a toy appears without any children being shown. The social context and spacial context tend to disappear, situating the child and the toy in a featureless space, in which context interactiveness means how the child interacts with the toy, and the non-social interaction between the other participant in the human activity and the child (Nichols, Nixon and Rowsell, 2009). Other research, such as that of Millei and Lee (2007) and Sunderland (2000), considers that in toy adverts aimed at children, the family is constructed and reconstructed around the youngsters, but that this is done in relation to themes such as care, education and, by extension, fun and leisure. These modes of representing the family have also been addressed in other studies which focus on the stereotyped gender relationships present in advertising discourses. In this vein, Arconada (1998) categorised the family stereotypes represented in the adverts: the mother/daughter, mother/son, father/son, father/daughter relationships and those with grandparents. In these studies, it is asserted that gender relationships among the female sex can fall into reinforcing stereotypes of beauty, affective-nutritional relationships and occupations such as housewife. The gender relationships among the male sex are based on stereotypes of success, bravery or skill. These representations reconstruct, in turn, the identity of the family as a cohesive body that consumes in unison in a domestic setting, as is shown in adverts for board games.

The work by Carter and Levy (1988) and by Martin, Eisenbud and Rose (1995) is included in this line of research into stereotypes and gender. The aforementioned authors analysed the uses and preferences in toy selection according to gender to measure the influence of social stereotypes on toy selection. Their results stated that children preferred toys which had previously been classified as being for their gender and rejected those categorised differently, and that the children selected toys based on their tastes if these lacked a sexist stereotype. Other research which investigated toy selection preferences includes that of Cherney (2005), Martin, Eisenbud and Rose (1995), Bradbard and Parkman (1983), Bradbard (1985) and Miller (1987). The work by Owen Blakemore and Centers (2005) proposed a circumstance where adults categorised toys by gender, obtaining results in which girls’ toys were associated with physical attractiveness, caring and domestic skills, whereas boys’ preferred toys were violent, competitive, exciting and a bit dangerous. Martínez, Nicolás and Salas (2013) drew similar conclusions when they studied representations of gender in advertising, as did Johnson and Young (2002), who