Children learn about social gender categories from an early age. In Western culture, boys are taught through everyday experiences to express independence, self-assertion and dominance, while girls are taught to be caring, kind and focused on others. Children's experience of childhood and play is becoming increasingly gendered and polarized between girls and boys, with products such as toys, books, online resources and clothing increasingly produced and marketed along gender lines. The subject of this paper is the influence of gender on spontaneous play in children. The paper presents an overview of current knowledge and is based on the rich literature of many authors who dealt with the issue of gender and play in children. The goal of the work is to investigate and systematize the current knowledge about the connection between gender and spontaneous play in children. The paper starts from the thesis that innate preferences for certain features of toys, combined with social influences, can explain why toy preferences are gender-related in children from an early age. The purpose of the paper is to consolidate previous research in order to help future educators in understanding the influence of gender on spontaneous play. A large number of studies have shown that a large part of children's spontaneous play is gender-related. As research shows, girls and boys really do play differently. The reason for this is cultural factors that instill gender stereotypes in children. But there are studies that prove that such differences are innate.