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

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. : (

earrings and lip gloss... gah... I dread my future

if u dont give ur daughter pink shit she will grow into a total dyke tho. dont want that.

my wife's mom+aunt's pierced her ears when she was just a few weeks old fwiw

nothing that chaps my ass more than little baby girls with ears pierced.

u must have a weird skincare regimen.

no offense to anyone but people who pierce baby ears are mentally ill imho

Does this mean Mordy's future kid is gonna be a lil girl? awwwwwwwwwww

Yeah, when my girl was two months old my wife all casually texted me to say that she was at the mall and going to drop by the piercing pagoda to poke holes into my baby! I threw a fucking fit.

xp lol yes

idk this is just me farting out stupid thoughts but I think if I had a (parent) who was worried abt me playing w/princesses, etc., things that are girly signifiers* ESP to other little girls? you know? I would be worried said (parent) was nervous abt the fact that I was a girl, at all.

*may be misusing this word, kinda insecure abt this part of kollij

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Voxp3ckwJZ0

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that my girl is going to turn out to be a princess, but since my wife and I are raising her, she'll at least be a benevolent princess.

Little girls caring about each others' appearance/"branding" (h8 this word) is kinda hard to handle, tho. Before I left the church at age 19 I was a Sunday school teacher for the four-year-old kids, six of whom were lil girls and one of whom was a lil boy who had kind of a bad rep but was actually awesome. The lil girls were all from wealthy households (compared to me) and the lil boy was from a v poor household (also compared to me). Those little girls were such shits already about clothing, appearance, etc! Criticizing each others' shoes, asking each other where they got their clothes from BUT they learned it from their moms or maybe more imptly from their older teenage sisters? I was never like that bcz I didn't have any examples to learn it from. I told them we weren't allowed to talk about where we bought clothes from, at church, anymore, bcz it hurt people's (the little boy's) feelings too much (also mine, lol).

also lol am I the only woman on this thread?

also LOL the only non-parent who is just a big fuxking know-it-all?

no offense to anyone but people who pierce baby ears are mentally ill imho

― Darin, Friday, February 4, 2011 1:40 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

otm

You guys hate Hispanic ppl. </ethan>

Joking joking!

Naw, Abbs, I'm right here with you on both counts.

high fives

xp to abbott, orenstein discusses in her book whether disavowing princess stuff can lead to the daughter feeling like the parents are disavowing the gender, esp if she is still young enough that in her mind the stereotypes about the gender are closely linked to the indivisible gender itself.

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.

like everything else in the book tho, she raises the question but doesn't really come down on either side. "something to keep in mind..." style of writing xp

no offense to anyone but people who pierce baby ears are mentally ill imho

her mom was 18 at the time, so

I was so hurt as a lil girl when my madre y padre wouldn't let me buy a NInja Turtles shirt because "they're not for little girls." But I would have been equally upset if they didn't let me play w/Barbies bcz that enforced some or another gender worry!

my mother got my ears pierced when i was a baby, and after unsuccessfully trying to get two more piercings in each ear myselft many, many years, i am glad she did!

best thing about the book is that orenstein is a big bettelheim fan and so she's constantly like, "Cinderella disney blows. go back to Grimm's and find the version where the sisters chop their feet up and birds peck out their eyes cause that'll help children develop better"

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