Galimberti's quote is confusing. How does she rank richer and poorer countries - I view most of these countries as very poor. And even if they were all equally poor (or rich), every country depicted here contains massive social inequality, ie runs the gamut of obscenely wealthy to extremely poor families. How and why were these children selected?

Interesting observations but they seem not to correlate with the depictions, at least not of the pictures chosen.

(1) Her claim that children pick toys they can relate to because of their living conditions. But then again, we see Barbie dolls (or similar) in most girls' pictures; and in the case of boys, both a boy from poor Mali and a "rich" boy from Texas are playing with dinosaurs (as well as my son and many other children who all find the mysterious beasts exciting).

(2) Her claim about the "possessive-ness" of richer kids sounds interesting. However, would a child from a poor Western family behave differently? Perhaps it is a matter of culture? Kids e.g. who are more used to live with an extended family and neighbours, with which toys must be shared?

If anything, the most striking difference I saw (and also seems to correlate with my own experience) is that while almost no politically correct Western parent would let his son play with so many guns; this is considered OK in post-Soviet cultures and probably other cultures less exposed to Western parenthood discourse (e.g. Arab culture).

Nevertheless, what I really found interesting, from the pictures you have chosen to show, is how universal the choice of toys is, even in poorer countries; and how universal toy choice is so gendered,

children play with whatever you give them to. And if they don't get anything they all will end up building all sorts of "guns", "dolls" and "balls from sticks and fabric..I don't see any value in this article.

any conclusions we could draw from this would be purely anecdotal. but the person responsible for this is a photographer, not a sociologist, scientist, or a researcher. what we can definitely conclude from this, though, is that children everywhere in the world are proud of their toys, and are, scientifically speaking, absolutely adorable.

I was struck by how many little girls had balls as their favourite toys. Not a single boy had a ball amongst his favourites in these photos. And I guess I noticed because I have a nephew who loooooves balls.

It's interesting that the children that seem to be from wealthier countries are more likely to have solely gender-appropriate (at least from this small set of photos and based on what is commonly assumed to be appropriate for gender in these countries), while those from poorer countries (specifically Africa, it looks like) are more likely to have toys we see as appropriate for both genders (the boy with the Valentine's Day bunny and the girls with Skeletor and other action figures).

How were these images chosen, entirely randomly? There seems to be a subtle bias.
The less affluent children are shown with more gender neutral toys and the more affluent with highly gendered toys (especially those two girls in all-pink rooms who are the ONLY ones like that in the entire slideshow). There is a good mix on the artist's website.

The only child shown with educational material is the girl from China, while children of various genders/races/wealth levels with books and learning tools are seen when you go through the slideshow.

All 'poorer' children from Africa are shown (mosquito nets check). To help people appreciate diversity in the continent, why not also include the affluent girl from Algeria? Or the girl from Egypt? The boy from Morocco? The boy from South Africa?

Perhaps to go along with the blurb, pictures of less affluent children smiling and more affluent/white children looking glum have been chosen. This is also not the case in the artist's slideshow, there the individual childrens' personalities shine through.

And my biggest criticism - how you could you not choose the photo of the girl with all those pairs of sunglasses!! It is super cute :)

Interesting how "America" becomes a default. We are informed of what country each of the children is from, except for the Americans. I've looked on the artist's webpage, and it is done there as well,l which is particularly interesting as the artist appears to be an Italian living in Italy.

Just looking at the photos shown here, the Chinese girl has, in my opinion, the best toys. Art supplies! Music toys! Blocks! Fake food! Big, soft plushies! If she wants a playmate, I am down.