All Hail the Backhoe! What is It about Boys and Trucks?

by Anna Watson
Issue 93, March/April, 1999

My 22-month-old son is mad for trucks. And not just any trucks--construction vehicles. Out of the vast variety of images he’s exposed to daily, he has honed in on dump trucks and cranes. How did this happen? My partner, Laura, and I are still trying to figure it out. Neither of us drives a big rig. Riley doesn’t watch TV. He has dolls. He loves flowers and animals. But boy, does he love backhoes.

At first, I was wary. My feminist sensibilities are slightly offended whenever a mom on the playground says proudly of her son, "He’s all boy! He loves trucks!" Isn’t there more to being a boy than loving trucks? Would a girl who loves trucks be all boy, too? Haven’t we come further than this? Surely my son, coming from our enlightened, nontraditional family, won’t have a truck gene. Wrong. There is no escaping Riley’s enthusiasm.

As the stay-at-home mom, I am drawn rapidly into Riley’s new interest. And after a brief initial hesitation, I plunge willingly and headlong into the world of the construction site. Riley’s excitement is infectious, and I find myself making detours so we can watch a forklift or excavator at work. In the car, he practically levitates out of his seat with joy when we pass a backhoe. "Mo’! Mo’!" he shouts. I try to explain that I can’t conjure earthmovers at will. But I suspect he thinks I’m being stingy. We buy a toy dump truck at a yard sale, and a relative in Illinois sends a nifty scale model of a John Deere tractor wheel loader.

But mostly we collect books. Touring our area libraries, we are rewarded with a truckload worth of choices. One library has an entire shelf labeled "Transportation." Elated, we bring home Diggers and Dump Trucks; Heavy Equipment: Work Trucks; Mighty Machines; and Construction Zone, their pages wrinkled and much-mended. In his fervor, Riley puts his mark on Mighty Machines, ripping the giant blue excavator right through the bucket. I get out the tape. I’m amused to see how many of these books have been written by women, and I’m pleased that they are, as a whole, informative, fun, and much less sexist than I had imagined. Which is good, because we read them over and over. Laura despairs. But I recall that my mother had to read Captain Kitty to me until she could recite it verbatim, so why should I be spared?

There must be something primal about big trucks, something that draws Riley to the noise and excitement. Work trucks are big, brightly colored, loud. They are stronger than anything in his daily life, and they probably seem unpredictable in a wonderful way. They are rough, with a potential for destruction not unlike his own impulse to hit, kick, pinch, and bite when he is frustrated. He and I spend a lot of time in our car, too – a much milder sort of machine – so he knows all about piloting large metal vehicles down the road. If Mama seems powerful driving the car, think how omnipotent a boy must appear in his imagination, perched behind the wheel of a backhoe. In an earlier era, a toddler might have watched men with bows and arrows, or a brace of oxen, and would have been given his own, boy-size replicas to play with. But nowadays, diggers and dumpers are what introduce him to that important, yearned-for, grown-up world.

When Riley first became interested in construction vehicles, I would sometimes shyly, casually approach moms of girl toddlers. "Does she . . . like trucks?" I would ask, usually earning a pitying look in reply. "Oh, sure, she likes them, but she’s not crazy about them." Well, Riley is crazy. Absolutely nuts. Lately, as I try to keep him from stomping ants and bullying other kids, I’ve been wondering if maybe it really is a boy thing, as people say. Something to do with his biological makeup. "A boy’s being vibrates to the rhythm of testosterone," say Don and Jeanne Elium in their sometimes infuriating but always interesting book Raising a Son: Parents and the Making of a Healthy Man. This hormone, they say, drives boys and men through a repetitive cycle of emotional buildup and eventual, sometimes-violent release. More benignly, it makes them really like trucks, with these machines’ barely contained violence, power, glorious potency, and superior force. Trucks are, let’s face it, cool!