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

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

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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