[Closed] Gender neutral toys

So you shouldn't buy blue for boys or pink for girls. Can't we just let children make their own minds up?

If the children are to make their own minds up then the shops need to stop having "boys' toys" and "girls' toys" and just have one "toys" section. The adults need to sort out their idiocy first.

Make their own minds up? Would that be by buying them a toy of a specific colour until they are conditioned to think thats whats normal?

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Edit - ^ girl is wearing pink, too. 🙂

I have a 6yo girl and 1 1\2 yo boy
She loves my old lego,transformers,micro machines zoids and mask toys iv handed down to her at the same time he will be happy sat playing with her dolls and cook set
Its nice to see them play with each others toys and not a care in the world what colour or what gender they were marketed for
When shopping we walk the whole store and mix \mach, I have to admit its crap to see how its so specific

We have treated all toys as gender neutral. All of them have played with whatever they liked and interestingly all have often played with toys often counter to the typical stereotype.

Where is the problem with gender specific toys?
some people just try too hard ...

Mooman, apparently being a 'boy' or a 'girl' is bad....you just have to be a person of indeterminable sex in this day and age!
Ignoring completely the fact that one of these produces testosterone as the dominant hormone from an early age and the other one produces oestrogen as the dominant hormone....new thinking is to ignore biology and desperately try to blend the sexes into one...it's bizarre and is as much social meddling as anything else with regard to the now frowned on older social conditioning of having 'boys toys' etc ....except that this is ok because it's bang on trend and achingly cool obviously.

Sex is not gender. Go read up on it and come back.

Where is the problem with gender specific toys?
some people just try too hard ...

Dinosaur and science toys in boy section of shop. Hairdressing toys in girl section of shop. Etc etc.

Are there no female paleontologists or scientists? Are there no male hairdressers? Does our different hormone balance preclude these careers?

Or are those of you who don't get the point just outdated trolling ****wits who are scared by the thoughts of little boys pushing around pink pushchairs and little girls kicking footballs?

It isn't blending the sexes into one - it's letting them do what they want to do!

Ha, good luck with this. We tried very hard to give the offspring gender-neutral toys, but she knows her own mind, and that mind is full of pink unicorns.

Trying to force gender neutrality is just as bad as forcing gender bias.

If you don't operate the toy with genitals then its suitable for both male and female.

If you do operate the toy with genitals then it's not suitable for kids.

Ha, good luck with this. We tried very hard to give the offspring gender-neutral toys, but she knows her own mind, and that mind is full of pink unicorns.
Trying to force gender neutrality is just as bad as forcing gender bias.

Great work there. Any other points you'd like to completely miss?

When he was about 18months old my eldest boy grabbed a hairbrush off my missus dressing table and promptly ran around with it pretending it was a plane. Figure that one out

What point? Yes, I agree that stereotyping of toys is a bad thing, and I'd be happier if my daughter grew up to be a scientist than a hairdresser. But the gender biasing of toys doesn't happen in a vacuum, the companies do it because it works.

Tackling that is much harder than just changing some packaging, it's about changing society's attitudes to women.

At the moment the three most exciting things in my two year old daughter's life are the bin lorry, baby-like dolls and jumping/climbing. Though everything is trumped by cake.

It's easier to change society's attitude to small children than towards women - start at the start.

Is she alowed to watch TV? Goes to playgroup? Will go to nursery? At some point, unless you keep her locked in a cupboard, she's going to become aware of wider society's attitudes.

Get a grip, boys are different to girls and like different things. The world would be a dull place if not...

do "gendered" toys prevent a little boy or a little girl from achieving what they want from life?

Is she alowed to watch TV? Goes to playgroup? Will go to nursery? At some point, unless you keep her locked in a cupboard, she's going to become aware of wider society's attitudes.

And your point is? Let them play with what they want - don't divide the toys by gender and don't make everything for girls pink. We can't change all of society but the toy thing is relatively easy. It's not hard to see that boys and girls are different - let them be different, don't force them to be the same or force them to be different. Freedom, for a few years at least!

Not at all dinosaur packs in the boys section however she wants to do palaeontology lol however she is 6 so this may well change but happy to support whichever route she chooses

Why stop there? Let's make their clothing all gender neutral too.

Boys can wear skirts if they want then? Hell, let's make adult stuff completely gender neutral!

Bloody madness.

*slips on Sunday bra*

I can't wait until my boy wants to play Hornby/Scalextric/bikes/football/etc. Does that make me a bad person according to STW?

My fiancee wants to make him ride horses. I have no interest in this. She also wants a girl next.

Get a grip, [s]boys[/s] [i]some girls[/i] are different to [i]other[/I] girls and like different things. The world would be a dull place if not...

Hope that's OK. My daughter will be devastated if she can't continue to show her male peers up with her sporting ability, I'll go and tell her now to take her basketball kit off and get her princess dress on to fit what some dinosaurs consider normal.

99% of the time in our shop the girls will go to the pink fluffy stuff and the boys will grab whatever they can hit someone with.
No one is forcing them it's just what boys and girls do.
My ex tried to make her little girl do martial arts. All she wanted to do was go to ballet with her friends.
Males and females are different.

bearnecessities: Hell, let's make adult stuff completely gender neutral

Funny you should say that - Selfridges have announced they are scrapping men's/women's sections in their stores...

As far as toys are concerned, no-one is claiming that boys and girls are identical, it's just that there is hard evidence that toy stores with divided sections place a subtle pressure on both children and parents to "fit in" and buy toys appropriately. This in turn then leads to girls in particular growing up with a restricted understanding of what opportunities are available to them.

Of course they don't want to be singled out by having toys fin the wrong section; as parents we keep reminding them they are in a "club" and wouldn't want to be in the other club. Why would they want their friends to think they want to be in the other club??

Rachel

Let them play with what they want

Yup, and what my 4-year-old wants to play with is Lego and drawing and reading and board games and marble runs. And pink unicorns.

I'm not arguing that gender-biased toys are a good thing, I'm arguing that that's part of a much larger battle. When the world is mostly run by white men in suits then the important battle is to get girls to understand that's wrong.

Rachel, does that include changing rooms? Will they stock ball gowns for the larger chap?!

Zippkona - I doubt it.

Rachel

Is the solution to not just buy girls a load of pink stuff but to also buy them some lego, mechano and science kits to see if they are interested in that sort of stuff?

Bought a book yesterday in a second hand book shop, the girl behind the counter apologised for the free recycled bag it being Wales so you have to pay for new ones, being pink in colour.

Seems as if even bags are sexist.

Boys do tend to miss out by not having dolls and tea sets as they are great for developing every day speech. Many boys play with just cars and dinosaurs etc have limited language and don't sequence in their play.

[quote=zippykona ]99% of the time in our shop the girls will go to the pink fluffy stuff and the boys will grab whatever they can hit someone with.
No one is forcing them it's just what boys and girls do.
My ex tried to make her little girl do martial arts. All she wanted to do was go to ballet with her friends.
Males and females are different.

It's what they do because it's what they've been conditioned to do. Of course you can't reverse that conditioning just by having gender neutral toys, but it will make a small difference and it is something which can be done. Presumably if your ex-step-daughter's friends all did martial arts she'd want to do that too - it's largely a conditioning and peer pressure thing.

I am glad in a way that I don't have daughters, so don't have to deal with the whole pink thing. Before anybody complains about my attitude with that, my son got a cooker for xmas one year, and they have tea sets and dolls (one of my oldest's favourites is a pink teddy) - though I don't think much about them being wrong gender, they're just toys. Youngest also goes to gymnastics where he is in a clear minority - something I'm really glad he does (it will help his rock climbing 😉 ), and disappointed that his older brother is so anti because he's already got infected with the idea that some activities are for girls.

Grrrr.... double annoyed now. My daughter plays basketball as above, at her age group (she's 8 ) they play mixed boys and girls. She holds her own at u10 level, but she also plays u12 so against some kids (boys and girls) who are four years older than her. She doesn't ask for favours, none are given, but experience and physical size count.

I just wish I could pause and reverse time, because the little ****er she played against today will always be older than her, and by the time age doesn't matter they'll be playing single sex. But for the record; girls can play basketball, and when she's 12 she'll be a far better player than you. And second, if you're going to try to take the piss out of your opponent don't do it to one that's just marked you out of the game.

So I'm annoyed because she's been upset by it, but doubly because he's got the stereotype ingrained that girls can't play sport. And he's got that stereotype from society in general and until we make an effort then it'll just persist.

"old folk with young kids" thread in the bike forum? 🙄

Can't any of you ever buy anything for your precious l'il ones without debating it to death on here?

Give us your address, mtbel, we'll be round shortly to rescue you from the kidnappers forcing you to read this thread.

I normally dont comment on threads like this but as this hits really close to home/brings my pee pee to a boil i just had to as it were. Its simple gender is innate, though sadly it sometimes doesn't match the sex the person was born with. Any way.....there was a point i was going to make.. o yes..
buy you child the toys that they want to play with, in simple terms offer them both traditionally boys and girls toys and let them decide what they like, if they want to act super girly or super male etc don't stop them. try not to push you preconceived ideas about gender on them, this applies to both super PC views and traditional views, both can be just as caustic and controlling if you ask me.
I believe i have a insight to this as from the ages of 0 -19 identified as male and after that i identified female.. lol and i played with toy guns, dolls and mud.

Next door's kids are often running about with their nerf stuff, he likes the bows, she likes the enormous machine gun. They do a definite boys line and girl's line with a bit of crossover in the middle but it's nice to see nobody seems to give a rat's ass really.

Mr Worried Snr
Overthinkers Cottage
Worrying
Isle of Worry
UK

Oh.. no.. That's the return address, isn't it?

When I saw the title I thought why did he use 'gender neutral'?

Uni sex toys answered my question.

mtbel...symptomatic of today's middle classes from what I see and hear around me.

Nobody seems to be able to make a decision without researching it first in the Internet, canvassing their friends opinion to make sure it's not a 'wrong' decision and the ultra PC method of bringing up children now that eschews gender stereotypes but instead conditions in an entirely different (but equally damaging) way so that the poor children don't have a mind of their own and just go along with whatever is on trend at the moment and are terrified of making a decision of their own incase it's 'wrong' too!

The last book I read on child development stated that the role of a parent is simply to provide a safe base from which the child can explore the world....I like that, nice and simple, no ulterior motive, no social conditioning etc....

It gets so boring watching and listening to the ongoing social experiment that raising a child seems to have become.
Friends telling you their little darling is 'amazing'...no he isn't, he's doing nothing that billions of other children his age haven't done and he'll end up in a normal 9-5 job like his friends and 99% of the population do.

deviant nails it!

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“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

[quote=deviant ]Nobody seems to be able to make a decision without researching it first in the Internet

Or in a book on child development? Out of curiosity, when you say "the last", just how many of them have you read?

It is of course possible to try and avoid gender stereotyping, without being "ultra-PC" and banning toys seen as stereotypically specific to your child's gender.

I went in Hamleys the other day to give my Aussie niece's the full London experience. It made me really cross. A whole floor of pink, girlie things and women in princess outfits. Hair dressing, dolls and a sodding toy vacuum cleaner! Grrrrr. When I was a young kid I wanted to be a boy for several years because the things that were considered normal for boys were what I liked... short hair, trousers, action figures, cars, wrestling and climbing trees! Luckily I had very liberal parents who allowed and encouraged me to be and do what I liked and as a grew up I realised I could be how I wanted and be a girl and it's not held me back.