Sugar and Spice, Dolls are Nice, and Pink is for little Girls...
Snails and Frogs, Trucks in Mud Bogs, and Blue is for little Boys...
What nonsense!
I grew up learning the certain-colors-are-for-certain-genders thing. Granted, I was never forced to conform to this. As much as I loved playing school teacher, I adored pretending to be a cowboy with my thumb gun or Spider-man shooting webs from my wrists. As much as I loved dressing my Barbie Dolls in foo-foo clothes, I loved my Hotwheels cars and building for hours with Lego blocks.
There likely is some sort of historic reason the pink/blue crap came to be (which I did not care to research for this blog) it boggles me that it is still a 'thing'. But now it's WORSE.
Give me a break that they make Lego sets in 'pink' now...geared for girls! Fairys and flowers for girls... Lego sets for boys, castles and dragons in dark colors (side note, I LOVED my Lego castle when I was a kid, I got it when I was 12, I wanted it SO badly for Christmas, when I was 12. Back when 12 year old kids were still actually kids)
What brought me to this topic is that for my work, I'm often in large chain stores. Recently we took on a project which has me smack dab in the middle of the toy aisle in several of these 'big box' stores. Spending so much time in these stores I noticed a few things that really opened my eyes.
I have heard multiple parents intentionally redirect their children to a different aisle in order to steer t them towards gender specific toys....
Some examples;
A young girl wanted to look at the skateboards, Mom said "skateboards are for boys" and kept walking...
A little boy wanted to get a doll, his Mom said "no this aisle is all pink girl stuff, let's go over to the aisle with toys for boys..." and grabbed his hand taking him to another aisle, though he resisted and really wanted a doll.
A young couple were in the store shopping for a gift for a child, the male was inquiring to the female what he should get the small girl. He was suggesting a doll for the girl, the female suggested some coloring supplies to draw...
Just let kids be kids... Don't direct them towards a certain toy, let them choose!
Alethea Anderson
MultiMediaMom.com
