Pink Everything! A Thread of Toys to Buy Daughters (and sons?) That Aren't Pink (or blue?)

The title is kinda a misnomer cause this is really just an opportunity to share anxiety + ambiguous feelings about marketing towards young girls (esp in the US). I've been reading Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter and getting a new thing to worry about. Interview with the author here - http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/01/27/peggy_orenstein_cinderella_ate_my_daughter - and she has written a few articles on this beat for the NYT (this the most recent one I could find tho there's one from a couple years ago that basically serves as the basis for the book): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/magazine/13fob-wwln-t.html.

On the other side, Slate reviewed the book by saying, "Just as there's no reason for a childless reader to pick up a book on potty training, there's not much call for anyone other than a middle-class, left-leaning parent of a young girl to pick up Cinderella," and I kinda get that this might just fit under the exclusively first world problems thread rubric.

Also, I want to use the thread for any recommendations of good toys for either gender. When I was growing up we played with Brio trains, Playmobile stuff and legos. (Had very few action figures + stuff.) So another question -- what'd you grow up playing with?

http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1279214118l/8565083.jpg

Also maybe somewhat related I just ordered Forever Barbie which Orenstein recommended and saw Superstar: The Karen Carpenter story which is kinda terrifying?

I have a 3 yo daughter who is WAY into the princess thing, through no prompting of our own. essentially as soon as she was exposed to it via other girls there was kinda no stopping it. on the other hand, she is also big into imaginative play stuff - Legos, her very gender-neutral dollhouse, singing/playing music - and she was apparently the only girl in her class who was excited to touch/play with insects so whatever, at this point I'm not really worried about the gender roles thing.

also Superstar is AMAZING

That's something that's totally crazy to me. I can't believe that 3 yo's have preferences for different brands, but apparently - I am learning - they do! Orenstein describes that Barbie partially fell out of fashion because parents bought them for 3-6 yo's and so by the time girls hit the regular (historically) age to be interested in Barbies, like 12ish, it was already too babyish. And that propelled the post-Barbie marketing stuff like Bratz and the tweens phenomenon, etc.

Our Amber is twelve

The idea that historically she'd just be getting into Barbie is, um, nonsensical.

I can't believe that 3 yo's have preferences for different brands

God, yeah.

Back in the day, etc...

Gender stereotyping of kids' toys is not cool and sometimes pretty o_O, but I'm not a big fan of the "won't somebody think of the children" genre of freaking-out-parents books either. And however bad that stereotyping is now, it was worse 40 years ago, and yet somehow lots of women grow up to be self-actualising, empowered individuals. In the same way that playing with toy guns didn't turn me into a gung-ho army dude with a rifle fetish.

also for Halloween she couldn't decide between being a cat or a spider (princess didn't even enter into it - although we did let her wear a tutu and corpsepaint for Day of the Dead. because it looked awesome)

my daughter doesn't know what brands are really. I mean she knows who some of the Disney princesses are and she recognizes Barbie but I don't think she really has a preference - it's all just window dressing

xp

And however bad that stereotyping is now, it was worse 40 years ago, and yet somehow lots of women grow up to be self-actualising, empowered individuals. In the same way that playing with toy guns didn't turn me into a gung-ho army dude with a rifle fetish.

^^^this. very important to bear in mind.

Barbie was initially a progressive doll bucking maternal/childrearing/housekeeping norms to be an astronaut or a fireman, but that doesn't mean that there isn't plenty of regressive gender stuff wrt her and that we shouldn't still be careful just bc it could be worse...

But also at the same time maybe it's not such a big deal and Orenstein writes early that you can dress in pink dresses when you're four and then want to be a doctor when you're eleven. One doesn't preclude the other and children grow out of phases.

I've just noticed that with my daughter she'll see something (whether it's a spaceship or a cowgirl or a ballerina) and become kinda fascinated with it and want to pretend/play around with the imagery. she just likes to pretend - whether it's an animal, or a rocket ship pilot, or a doctor, or a princess. I guess some elements occupy her attention a little longer than others but so what.

xp

I've thought before about starting a thread to talk about books like this and Last Child in the Woods, cos they seem to me to partly address real issues or problems, but largely to prey on parents' alienation or fear of social change, even tho social change is something that they grew up with themselves, and is at least partly a necessary condition for our kids to come to terms with.

my daughter loves to have this dialogue read to her before bedtime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUpLiJfV4_A

oh my god. i think i last saw that in 2nd grade.

There's a tension between what you want for your child and what the child wants for themself thru exposure to a peer group and the media and their wider society. And I think it's v. difficult - one wants to instil values, and that's good, but in the end there's no direct way of instilling your own values and what will be more important to your child's development is their negotiation with the world outside the family.

One thing I was wondering about is whether you can mediate some of this media/peer stuff. Like maybe if they get into princesses you can make sure they're exposed to the concept through a variety of mediums. Maybe you read them Hans Christian Anderson instead of just putting on a Disney flick, or feminist re-envisionings of fairy tales (tho most of these that i've seen tend to be intended for adult readers).

Well, yeah? I wanted to a be a princess but only the kind who has her own horse and sword, and my friend's son wanted to be a fireman-knight, not because knights fight battles or anything, but because both of them save people who are in trouble. Pretty much you can count on a healthy kid with a swathe of different influences to get something different out of each one, and it probably won't be the thing you THOUGHT they'd get, either.

Absolutely! Prohibiting access to stuff becomes unworkable very fast, even if it was desirable - I've got some Disney-hating friends who have set themselves up for years of heartbreak re. making their children dislike something intrinsicly likeable. But introducing other kinds of ideas and versions of identity is easy and fun, yeah? As long as we never expect our kids to like the stuff they actually ought to like, dammit.

parents' attitudes and examples of gender roles 1000x more important than Barbie vs. Gi Joe imo. our daughter naturally gravitated towards girlie stuff - total opposite of my wife as a kid - but turning it into an issue would just make her covert her friends' toys. and there are tons of Girl Power messages out there, esp. at the library

mordy otm, turning them on to the wide range of culture (pop and high) beyond the Disney/Nick marketing machine v important too

I have a son and definitely feel like there's a lot less gender-oriented toy/clothing/etc. issues to worry about than if we'd had a daughter or if we do have one later. When people we know have girls we kinda make a point not to buy any pink stuff (although obviously will still get pretty/girly clothes) because even if the parents tell everyone not to go overboard with the pink, you know the aunts and grandmothers etc. will make the baby shower look like a bottle of pepto-bismol exploded.

parents' attitudes and examples of gender roles 1000x more important than Barbie vs. Gi Joe imo

I'm not at all sure this is true, really, but I am big on Judith Rich Harris.

I think part of it is that for their first year or two of life, kids can appear a little gender neutral, like even if you look at them and can tell they're a boy or girl it's not like there's a lot of inherent behavioral differences (although my 16 month old is SUCH a boy and in my mind always has been), so a lot of it I think is the parents just asserting their gender and getting comfortable with that identity and making them feel more like a person and not a little blob.

Just found Peggy Orenstein's Schoolgirls on my bookshelf yesterday while cleaning. Great book about girls and self-esteem in educational environments.

Disney movies my daughter has watched:

Snow White
The Three Caballeros
Alice in Wonderland
Tron

of these her favorite is far and away the Three Caballeros (which she refers to as "dancing princesses"). But yeah she's been exposed to a lot of other "princess" archetypes, ranging from the super-old school Olde Englishe Fairey Tales type to this book about a little black girl who wants to be a princess in a parade (she is especially fond of this book and it has a total multi-culti/neo-feminist POV, refs Chinese warrior princesses and African royalty etc)

my brother's daughter is just a few months younger than my son, she got like every Disney princess movie on DVD for Christmas. i don't think they're gonna over-girly her up, though.

I stress about this sometimes when picking toys for my daughter, so whenever possible I just let her choose between the frilly pink thing and whatever the other option is. Nine times out of ten she wants the frilly pink thing.

As long as you aren't imposing your own baggage on the pink vs blue deal, I figure whatever. Little girls like pink stuff. News at 11.

More like 'why do little girls like pink things' News at 11 and maybe it turns out that the news is that they are socially mediated into liking it (especially blew my mind that in the early 20th century pink was a boy's color - a more pastel version of red - and blue, associated with Mother Mary + stuff, was a girl's color)

And if they are learning to like it from social convention, the (rightful) anxiety is: What else are they learning to like from social convention?

Well now that's a better question.

I find ILX's preoccupation with "OMG things are socially created!" to be rather baffling. (A similar concern was voiced on the other man/woman thread about monogamy being a social construct, etc.)

NEWSFLASH: everything is a social construct

language, identity, gender, etc. pretty much the only thing about people that isn't a social construct is our DNA.

dna does a whole fucking lot

Sorry - I didn't mean that to come off so dismissive. I'm just saying that my daughter (who is only 18 months old I should add) definitely gravitates towards what you might call stereotypical "girl" colors and interests. We don't allow any tv watching at her age and I think we are doing a pretty decent job at allowing her to make the choices of what she wants to wear, play with, etc.

xxxx-post

dna does a whole fucking lot

it sure does!

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/sbdtc/students/2007/robert_gardner/science_in_the_news/2010_04-06/mr_dna.png

Shakey, I'm not sure what your point is -- is it that bc almost everything is socially mediated that means we shouldn't worry about what kinds of things get mediated? I don't see how one follows from the other unless you're stumping for some kind of self-justifying conservative argument that the way things were should dictate the way things are. And I don't think that's gonna be a particularly popular position here. Maybe you're really just pointing out the self-evident -- lots of stuff is socially conditioned! -- and I'm misreading your tone as being argumentative + contrary?

Isn't a lot of the pink vs blue issue just about how the mind is predisposed to categorizing things as a means of ownership? We could totally change the palette but in 100 years we'd be bitching that girls wear too much green or whatever.

Yeah, it's not really about the pink. It's more about the 'princess.'

no we should worry about what gets mediated insofar as what makes for happiest/healthiest/most productive people possible, I just think pointing out that something is socially mediated does not in and of itself invalidate it. it seems like a lot of times people (and I'm not saying you did this but it does happen) act as though stating that something is a social construct is an attack against it. Like, saying "gender is just a social construct!" is not really a helpful statement. it's like saying the sky is blue.

xp

Isn't a lot of the pink vs blue issue just about how the mind is predisposed to categorizing things as a means of ownership? We could totally change the palette but in 100 years we'd be bitching that girls wear too much green or whatever.

yep

Ok, but I don't think anyone is saying that here.

Anyway, back to the original question about toy recommendations, Chloe is way into Play-doh, toy instruments, and crayons.

well when you ask something as broad as this:

the (rightful) anxiety is: What else are they learning to like from social convention?

the answer is an awful lot. Like whether or not your daughter chooses princesses or cowboys, both choices are tied up in social convention.

my son is into thomas the train and anything Toy Story related, but he also loves all things art related.

parents' attitudes and examples of gender roles 1000x more important than Barbie vs. Gi Joe imo

the more i look at this thread the less i feel like i have anything to say but to echo this. i think a girl who gets the whole princess or daddy's girl treatment for the first x years of her life is more likely to be a lame or vapid or anti-intellectual or annoyingly girly or infantile adult woman regardless of what toys she has and that there's no real behavioral pattern across the board for all girls that play with Barbies that transcends the gender roles in their family environment. the toys and the clothes are just a surface-level indicator.

i buy my son sports gear to wear and stuff, he's 2 1/2 but never demand that he put it on.

re: young girls wearing makeup earlier and earlier http://www.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/lip-gloss-gateway-drug particularly this quote resonates:

The problem with lip gloss at 5 isn't really lip gloss at 5. (Well, except for Rory, for whom the lip gloss itself clearly is a problem.) The problem is that, as with so many things, the earlier you start with lip gloss, the earlier you start feeling that lip gloss is for babies. Leslie Gibbs, marketing director at Aspire Brands, home of Bonne Bell and Lip Smackers (shades of my own girly youth), says "girls start cosmetics usage really as young as 6. Then, at a certain age—and that's becoming younger and younger—she begins to want to enter real cosmetics as an enhancement." Gibbs sees that as a good thing, of course, but I'm unconvinced. Lip gloss, like so many other things, is subject to a fundamental error I've made often as a parent: too much, too soon.

My wife wants to get my daughter's ears pierced on account of when she's at the age where she'll actually want to get her ears pierced, she'll be too grubby and irresponsible to take care of them and it'll probably get infected. I have never been so opposed to something she wanted to do since the time she wanted to buy my son a chihuahua, but dammit I'm not giving in this time. I can't bear to think about my poor little baby with fucking gold-ass earrings in her perfect little ears. : (

ha - working in retail i have developed a shortcut to figuring out baby gender: immediately ask 'aww how old is your baby?' bc then you'll always get a 'he's [...] old' or 'she's [...] old'

haha Laurel my mom-in-law had me read that book when she first me me and I think it broke her <3 that I didn't totally embrace it and say like "yes I am the proud ugly duckling thx for opening my inner woman."

n/a, we tried to do the same gender-neutral clothing thing "what's all this pink shit? can't I find a girl's onsie in yellow or something?" but once she was born, we started dressing her in pink most of the time because we realized that she is inherently a princess and we were totally cool with that.

Wld you like me to knit future Lil Girl Mordy a nice gender-neutral baby hat, Mordy? I am itching to make a baby hat!

ALternately I could make a ridic Victorian lace bonnet, the choice is yours.

Def! That sounds awesome

Hmm prob the first one...

my son does love to wear costumes, he wore a tigger costume for two days once. fantastic.

hey I want a victorian lace bonnet too!

Send me an email abt yr choice of baby colors...idk if that's a thing. I just imagine ppl who have a baby picking out paint chips like "these are the ones for lil zygote here."

Ha Shakey I cld if you want! I just have a cool vintage pattern I want to make but no one I know likes fancy stuff for babies!

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2136/2089488834_fef8be6375_z.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5054/5416672554_1d0c7f6e14.jpg

yeah i mean i know what you mean, the idea of gender policing children is horrible and gross to me but as a parent idk the idea of like gender neutral clothing and neutrally coded toys is really great and righ-on and everything but in the end these kids are gonna end up in some school w/ kids w/ shitty douchebags for parents and i can imagine all yr idealism is gonna get crushed just by the fact that you cant completely fabricate this righteous context for them at all times and the world is terrible and awful.

Abbotsville, that bonnet is heirloom material!! Anyone should be amazed and grateful to have it made for their bebe.

yeah thats beautiful. you should sell them.

Chrisv: when the "Halloween Store" opens every year, we always end up buying our guy two or three costumes, because he'll totally play with them for dress-up during the rest of the year.

Abbott current kid too old for a bonnet, but will get to work on making a new one so that I can ask you for one lol

yeah he was Buzz Lightyear for Halloween this year, that costume has got a ton of use. His favorite christmas present this year was Woody pajamas that resemble woodys outfit. We have to wash them daily so he can wear them daily.

my son does love to wear costumes, he wore a tigger costume for two days once. fantastic.

― Cultivating a manly musk puts your opponents on notice (chrisv2010), Friday, February 4, 2011 2:04 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

haha that's great. i should put the picture of my son in a giraffe costume last halloween on the 77 parenthood thread

yo before you go calling people who pierce baby ears "mentally ill" (oops too late) there is a cultural factor here. pretty sure there are other countries where piercing baby ears is just what's done and has been done for a long time. my sister was born in india and they wanted to pierce her ears right in the hospital.

Well, I was thinking of some friends of mine irl who pierced their baby's ears, posted the photos on Facebook with the mom in the background laughing. I wasn't really thinking about other cultures - just personal exp w/friends & relatives.

Also, no offense Darin, but fuck mental illness stigmas. Fuck them in the fucking ass.

point taken. pierce away everyone!

:)

yo before you go calling people who pierce baby ears "mentally ill" (oops too late) there is a cultural factor here.
...but isn't the heart of this particular cultural factor gender policing? Piercing ears to make sure that strangers know that this baby is a girl or isn't a girl, and can treat them appropriately. It seems to me that this practice is way more prevalent in cultures with very clear gender roles. Also, why can we not be critical of this, but we can criticize anti-homosexuality laws in africa and female circumcision(not that I'm trying to compare ear piercing to either...)? These are also cultural norms and "what's done and has been done for a long time". Cultures aren't static, they're changing all the time

kate otm. piercing babies ears is totally weird - in my wife's case it was primarily lol teenagers in action.

In my neighborhood, it was every girl's 7th birthday present.

yeah i remember it was like what little girls got when they made their communions but then that is not the only creepy imagery that has to do w/ first communions

guys you can't get offended by a comment that's preceded by the phrase "no offense." that's the rule.

my girlfriend got her ears pierced when she was about a month old. I'm pretty sure we're going to get into an argument about ear piercing if ever we have a daughter together.

my parents had my ears pierced when I was really little. wish they hadn't. stopped wearing earrings age 9 or 10 and the holes never properly closed over, they're still visible. I've always considered having them re-pierced professionally just to have something there other than tiny holes.

also I'd kind of be terrified to let a 16-year-old in a mall with a piercing gun shoot metal through my kid.

nb not that I have a kid or ever will, I was hypothetically speaking

I've noticed that these days "girly" consists less of princess and pink and more of designer high heels and handbags. I get the dreaded feeling that little girls and pre-teens are more inclined to play pretend designer couture dress-up than wanting to play with dolls and be cutesy these days.

I was thinking a lot about this thread while we were in sandbox, and on the re: Girls thread thread. I can't remember what I specifically wanted to update it with, but here's a link to a story about a little girl that decided she wanted to be a little boy named Calvin based on the comic strip:

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/01/12/calvin-and-hobbes-2/

http://youtu.be/-CU040Hqbas

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/-CU040Hqbas"; frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I mean

Oh fuck it, I give up

With a baby girl on her way I often think of the whole pink/purple thing. They have never been my favorite colors. I liked red a lot as a very little girl. I now see pink/purple as a part of childhood. Because our baby girl is due in the spring I like the idea of her wearing pale greens, yellows in addition to pink and purple. Doesn't bug me as much as I thought it would.

My mother had her ears pierced a week after she was born. It is a tradition in Mexico to get baby girl's ears pierced, it would seem, before they start cutting teeth. My paternal grandmother who is Native American was against it and put up a fight so it never happened. But she did take me to get them pierced at 16. Many of the Hispanic baby girls I see with tiny gold earrings, are wearing earrings that have been handed down. My mother still has her first pair. I go back and forth on it.

one of the most amazing things i learnt from the book i was talking about in the original post was that until a certain point in time blue was considered a girls color bc of virgin mary connotations and pink was considered a pastel version of the boy color red. at some point they flipped

my mom forwarded me some article recently discussing how the colors have shifted over time (it opened with a description of Teddy Roosevelt as an 8 yo - in a pink dress, with shoulder length hair, etc.) Pink didn't become a "girl's" color until sometime in the mid-20th century.

I actually love blue and would love for her to wear the blue and white checkered outfit my husband wore home when he was born.

so far we've done okay with the gendered toys. ppl have bought toy purses (complete w/ pink credit card) and pink toy cellphones for D, which we didn't throw away, but we've supplemented w/ lots of more gender neutral toys like brio train tracks, legos, blocks, puzzles. D loves baby play + dolls so we haven't made any attempt to restrict those. a bunch of the dolls are pink. a lot of her clothing is 'girly' too (her bubbie buys her a lot of frilly dresses) but w/ a wide color palette and she has a variety of clothing + shoes to choose between. so basically -- we're fighting the overwhelming/unending war against gender essentialism in toys/books/clothing.

anyway, the thread bump is bc D's bubbie wants to buy her this for channukah. on one hand, i think the characters are cute, i am not totally opposed to princess play (i'm not sure how i feel about disney pushing it but i think it's historically natural - not just in continental fairy tales but even in jewish tradition i think little girls have been dressing up like queen esther and boys as king achashverosh on purim for a long time). on the other hand - ew:

http://www.toysrus.com/graphics/product_images/pTRU1-13112916_alternate1_dt.jpg

and it sings? i just don't know. maybe i should take a pass on this one and ask my mother to get something else? or am i over-reacting and this is totally okay for my daughter?

obv feel free to push back on my use of 'historically natural' - i just meant it in the bruno bettelheim freudian sense that maybe this kind of royalty fairy tale play has psychologically significant reasons for existing - i'm not totally prepared to write it off as social policing...

The fantasy life of kids is unavoidable. It's always churning around just under the surface. Your job is helping them figure out how to transform all that crazy wishful thinking into learning how to create a happy life.

My hunch is that the modeling you do for your children is x1000 times more important to how they eventually grow up, than whether their toys are pink or blue. The really important lessons, like treating others with respect and accepting responsibility, should override a lot of gender-related crap they get elsewhere.

If you have doubts about it just say no. It's absolutely fine to pick and choose your children's toys and clothes and you should feel no qualms or guilt whatsoever about nixing stuff with no (or little) explanation necessary.

We've had so much stuff like that wash through our house over the years and imho with things like farms, castles, dolls houses etc, the actual building is the unimportant thing. It's the furniture, animals, "guys" etc that they really like and setting it all up and so on is the real fun. If they have tons of those then they set them up anywhere. Any old shoebox works just as well as the castle. Better actually because they wreck it and you chuck it out and they find a better box next time. So the worst thing is not the gender-stereotyping but the fact that you have to have it around forever and they don't play with it that much. Oh, and it's gonna stop "singing" in about two weeks.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/a-wondrous-gif-shows-the-most-popular-baby-names-for-girls-since-1960/280709/

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/ku-bigpic.gif

love the jennifer stranglehold for over a decade - guess it's the quintessential american girls name

it's also interesting to me how Sophia is the most popular name in 2011 + 2012. that's what we named our babby this year. she was named after a great aunt (sophie) which we turned into Sophia bc it's a hebrew word from ashet chayil ("she watches") and bc we loved the name. and then incidentally a ton of other ppl also named their daughters sophia for presumably mostly unrelated reasons (but likely related in some deeper cultural/aesthetic sense).

There's got to be some kind of delay phenom with baby names where ppl get a shortlist of favorites before they're actually having kids, and then use those favorites 10 years later or something. In 1997-ish I had a Classics prof who had a little girl named Sophia, which he said they chose for its classical associations and bc it reads the same in a large number of languages. I thought about it for years and always liked it but never ended up having kids...but if I had, it might have been in the last few years...which is when it peaked.

Lol @ Ava tho.

http://www.womenyoushouldknow.net/flatten-heroine-artist-puts-disney-princess-filter-10-real-life-female-role-models/

so I'm not sure if this is exactly in the spirit of this thread but I've been seeing a growing number of cool toys either aimed specifically at girls or young children in general that teach engineering and programming skills in a fun way. Here are some good ones:

http://www.goldieblox.com/
http://www.roominatetoy.com/
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danshapiro/robot-turtles-the-board-game-for-little-programmer

re goldieblox: http://m.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthood/2013/1121/Anti-princess-branding-beyond-the-bandwagon