How is 2011 can we have these toys for girls?

[HydraMoon]

Pretend play is a huge part of any well cared for child's learning experience. It's patently pathetic that we still, as a society, limit our children's learning/enrichment because of their sex.

Give boys baby dolls and vacuums, let little girls have a tonka truck- the world will not end.

 

[Altorin]

little girls like playing house?

it's ok, we don't have to raise all of our kids to hate the idea of traditional gender roles, at least when they're little kids. Boys typically like to play army and Girls typically like to play with dolls and play house.

It's just giving parents what their kids want.

I completely understand where you're coming from, I just think you're freaking out a little over nothing.

 

[Lilani]

Ok. So i was killing time looking at the toy section at K-mart trying to think of what to get my nieces and nephews for there upcoming birthdays. I was in the girls section. I saw the typical fanfare(barbies,Baby doll and cooking toy etc.) When i saw a line of "Her first" toys. What i saw appalled me. "Her first Vacuum cleaner","Her first washer and dryer" and "her first refrigerator" all of them functional item from what i could see. I was just there speechless trying to process who came up with these idea and who would buy them for there daughters. I wrote in a paper awhile back about how toys are used to prepare kid for what is expected of them. And this just seems to prepare little girls for housework.

But, little girls usually like those sorts of things. They like taking care of baby dolls, they like making play-dough meals, and they like playing around in and maintaining their playhouses. Don't blame the toy companies. They're just following the rules of basic marketing. Supply and demand. There is a demand for those products, so they are supplying it. Nobody ever said parents have to buy those things for their daughter. They're just there.

And just look at what is marketed to little boys. Construction sets, toy landmoving vehicles, toy power tools, sports toys. And again, those are usually toys boys want. So they make them.

I think you should just get your kid the toys they are inclined to play with. None of this "get the boy Barbies and get the girl toy trucks to break down the barriers of gender-roles" bullshit. The children themselves will show you what toys they want. If you want to go for a "natural" way to teach your child about gender roles, what could be more natural than letting them play with what they want, rather than forcing them into whatever mold you pick for them?

 

[Hatter]

There's this kids size kitchen that my older sister had when we were little, she liked it, then it was passed on to my little sister, she also liked it, and then it was passed on to the littlest of my sister's and she also has fun with it. But there's a twist, my youngest sister has downs syndrome and heart problems, and isn't going to make it past her teens, therefore she would never actually use a kitchen, but she still likes to play with it, and I'm sure she would like to play with the toys that you mentioned in the OP.

I can understand why you'd have a problem with these toys, but,(For me) the personal experiences I mentioned above make your issues invalid.

 

[Princess Rose]

Ok. So i was killing time looking at the toy section at K-mart trying to think of what to get my nieces and nephews for there upcoming birthdays. I was in the girls section. I saw the typical fanfare(barbies,Baby doll and cooking toy etc.) When i saw a line of "Her first" toys. What i saw appalled me. "Her first Vacuum cleaner","Her first washer and dryer" and "her first refrigerator" all of them functional item from what i could see. I was just there speechless trying to process who came up with these idea and who would buy them for there daughters. I wrote in a paper awhile back about how toys are used to prepare kid for what is expected of them. And this just seems to prepare little girls for housework.

That is absolutely awful. I've read reports similar to the one you mentioned - toys DO influence beliefs about gender roles (no matter what the immature respondents in this thread keep saying - they didn't read the studies you and I have).

If my kids want to learn to cook (either gender) I'll teach them. Preferably on real kitchen equipment when they're old enough to use it properly.

Oh, and to the people on this thread saying "boys get guns and they don't become cowboys" - actually, guns are marketed to boys to encourage them to join the military. That is the REASON that, during the 50s, people specifically marketed house-wife toys to girls and military toys to boys - to influence their future choices.

 

[Amethyst Wind]

It's certainly not right that they're marketed at girls. I'd prefer they be marketed at all children. Regardless of your gender, you should know how to use these things, comes in real handy later on.

So yeah, I'd prefer they be marketed as unisex toys, but I'm not diametrically opposed to the idea of them as toys in their own right.

 

[evilstonermonkey]

...So? The name is stupid I guess, but little girls LIKE that stuff.What you play with as a little kid doesn't necessarily reflect who you'll be twenty years from then.

Girls like to play with toy vacuum cleaners? Heck, just let them use the real thing, that way they can be a little more productive.

But seriously, do you believe little girls truly like to play with toy household appliances? or is there perhaps a certain amount of social conditioning to make girls want to do these kinds of things?

Just a thought.

I dont know about girls in particular, but some kids do genuinely enjoy playing with toy appliances. My nephew absolutely loves pushing the vacuum cleaner around. He's still too small for the whole thing, but whenever the head gets taken off (ie the bit that goes against the floor, plus about about a meter of metal pipe) he pushes it around making vacuum cleaner noises.

I notice you have no complaints about "his first tool set," or "his first lawn-mower," or "his first truck." IMO, you're more sexist than the people who make the toys.

Thats because im not talking about boys toys. Im talking about girls toys. Boys have it set. Its alot easier for Men to move up the ladder then it is Women to. Go look up the "Glass ceiling" or "Sticky floor" sometime. It is because it is often seen as not a women place to be in a job markets or because they cannotbecause they have to go home and work a "Double shift". Men have it made. Women dont.

The phrase "men have it made" has troll stamped all over it, soI guess I've been successfully trolled.
Men and Women are different, and as such have different problems. In some areas women have it worse, in others men are at the disadvantage. Some would say that women lose out in more areas, and I won't argue that especially since as a male myself I have a lesser awareness of their issues. However, as a male I can also confidently refute that "men have it made."

It is considered tragically common for women to have body issues, but there is little awareness of the same problem occurring in males. This link [http://www.psychology.org.au/publications/inpsych/body_image/] is to an article from the Australian Psychological Society on the subject.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health [http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/suicide-in-the-us-statistics-and-prevention/index.shtml], around 4 times as many men in the USA die of suicide than women do.

This article [http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/male-depression/MC00041] details how clinical depression can be worse for men than for women, and I will quote a section that particularly illustrates why psychological issues can be especially problematic for guys:

As a man, you may not be open to talking about your feelings with family or friends, let alone with a health care professional. Like many men, you may have learned to place an emphasis on self-control. You may think it's "unmanly" to express feelings and emotions associated with depression, and instead you may try to suppress them.

And that is merely the first three I could think up and be bothered finding supporting evidence for before I got bored of building this wall of text.

 

[blaize2010]

thats not as bad as: this shit [http://www.cracked.com/article_19288_8-weirdly-sexual-products-you-wont-believe-are-kids.html]
theres a stripper pole. for your possibly-8 year old daughter. i like to imagine the people buying these products are either arrested as suspected peadophiles.

them damn peadophiles. always after your vegetables.

 

[likalaruku]

I think it's more the "her first" part that's bad. They should replace it with "kids' first," so they will hopefully get the knack of helping mom around the house when they're teenagers...Unlike me whom is almost 30 & still can't be trusted with laundry. The biggest crime is that they assume little boys don;t need to be prepared to take care of themselves when they grow up.

There are much worse stereotypical things they could make....Her First Tanning Salon, Her First ManiPedi, Her First Hairstylist, Her First Tupperware Party, Her First Avon Lady.

What I really hate is the slutty Brats dolls they sell to little girls.

When I was a little girl, my mom bought me books, barbies, GI Joes, stuffed animals, playdo, washable markers, & legos....& if it was in the budget, a Sega Genesis cartridge.

 

[Canid117]

So I take it you have not been in a toy aisle in the last 200 years.

 

[Torrasque]

Kinda like boys are color coordinated to be blue from a young age, while girls are pink.
Color =/= sex, so /shrug

Society is stupid, that much has been certain to me for the last 15 years.

 

[JMeganSnow]

The thing I don't get about this, is if your kids want to *play* at doing housework, why on earth aren't you LETTING THEM DO THE HOUSEWORK. SOMEBODY has to do it.

Anyway, as actual parents will tell you, keeping little girls away from dolls and other "girly" toys is basically pointless. My mother tried it. I had trucks and lincoln logs and tinker toys and all that stuff. And I WANTED a baby doll. I used my lincoln logs to make a house for my Barbie.

Later, when my brothers inherited my dolls, they would use them as enemy combatants. My parents refused outright to buy toy guns for my youngest brother, so he would make them out of legos or basically any piece of plastic that was shaped like an L. He'd point it at you and go "pew pew" (apparently it was a laser gun).

 

[Jubbert]

In my opinion anything that gets my significant other to willingly clean things for me is a good thing.


...What can I say? I'm lazy, and a douchebag.

 

[PurplePlatypus]

A question for people.

Did anyone else, when they were quite young, want a particularly toy aimed at the other gender but never had it because it wasn?t for them, maybe there was even a sense of embarrassment there? It happened with me; my parents even offered to buy me one because they knew I liked them, I said no even though if someone else owned it I was all too happy and not the least embarrassed to play with it.


I suppose for me such a thing wasn?t much of a problem because I had brothers and we freely shared toys. It still kind of worries me that it ever happened and that it got to point where I did it to myself when nobody else was around to do it.


The problem isn?t that those toys exist but who they are pretty much exclusively marketed towards.It's a damned lie if some people don't think there aren't enough boys out there who actually kind of do want to play with that stuff to.

 

[Guilherme Zoldan]

I dont see the problem being in how it effects the children. Sure it influences the kid but not in any major way, Im pretty sure most independant and working women have played with barbies when they were younger.
The problem is the thought behind those products, the atitudes towards women that are reflected in them.
Even if we are growing out of it we still have that primitive mentality of gender roles in which men are hunters and warriors(as reflected in your GI-Joes,Action Mans and such) and women are mothers and take care of the home. Thats an OLD fucking concept that our culture has mantained ever since we were in caves.

 

[siahsargus]

Yeah, they've been making 'her first' stuff for freaking ages.

I mean, sure it's 'sexist or whatever' for a little girl to be mad to 'want' to play with the oven or the fridge or the little toy dishwsher...

But has no one remembered one of the most twisted things parents buy for their girls without considering it?

Baby Dolls.

And I'm not even saying this because they're lifeless, vacant-eyed little bastions of pants shitting terror.

It's just never felt right to me that at ages as young as 3 want baby dolls...
They want to pretend they're mothers. I've watched my (at time of writing) 6 year old niece play with baby dolls and it's really damn awkward to watch...

It's a 6 year old girl, pretending that she's mothering what can only amount to a dead baby.
(without getting into the ones that blink, cry, talk, move their mouths or piss themselves...)

It's freaking creepy.

Whether this stuff really imprints on a young girl (the cooking stuff) I don't know.
They seem to enjoy playing with it a lot more than boys do...
Guess that's what counts...

But I will not be buying a baby doll for my little girl, which shouldn't happen because I want a strapping boy whom I can teach to be like Gaston from Beauty and the Beast.

Quit bitching. I had a baby doll until my sister stole it, and I still have a teddy bear. I don't give two shits about gender roles or anything else, ever. I do what I want to do, social mores be damned.

 

[Archemetis]

Yeah, they've been making 'her first' stuff for freaking ages.

I mean, sure it's 'sexist or whatever' for a little girl to be mad to 'want' to play with the oven or the fridge or the little toy dishwsher...

But has no one remembered one of the most twisted things parents buy for their girls without considering it?

Baby Dolls.

And I'm not even saying this because they're lifeless, vacant-eyed little bastions of pants shitting terror.

It's just never felt right to me that at ages as young as 3 want baby dolls...
They want to pretend they're mothers. I've watched my (at time of writing) 6 year old niece play with baby dolls and it's really damn awkward to watch...

It's a 6 year old girl, pretending that she's mothering what can only amount to a dead baby.
(without getting into the ones that blink, cry, talk, move their mouths or piss themselves...)

It's freaking creepy.

Whether this stuff really imprints on a young girl (the cooking stuff) I don't know.
They seem to enjoy playing with it a lot more than boys do...
Guess that's what counts...

But I will not be buying a baby doll for my little girl, which shouldn't happen because I want a strapping boy whom I can teach to be like Gaston from Beauty and the Beast.

Quit bitching. I had a baby doll until my sister stole it, and I still have a teddy bear. I don't give two shits about gender roles or anything else, ever. I do what I want to do, social mores be damned.

I don't remember bitching being a big part of my post...

Expressing my disliking towards a particular children's toy, I remember.
(because to me, they are creepy.)

Saying these kinds of toys have been around for a long while, I remember.

Saying it's not proven whether these kinds of toys have a lasting affect on young girls, I remember.

Bitching though? No, don't remember that.

Perhaps you can fill me in?