This is the kind of thing I'm talking about!

Here's an example of Legos for girls then:





























and now:

http://belville.lego.com/en-us/default.aspx

It's a credit to them that Lego has learned to nail their demographic, but it's a loss to children - boys and girls - that what was a great non-gendered toy has become hopelessly gendered. Presumably boys won't play with girl Lego blocks and vice-versa. And let's not even get into the "crappyness creep" of the modern Lego play set as compared to the more utilitarian sets of blocks of my youth.

http://www.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/i-miss-legos
http://www.feministing.com/archives/019627.html

Plastic Toys and Licensed Characters Are Like High Fructose Corn Syrup and Hydrolyzed Oil.

I recently had this email exchange with my dad:

My dad wrote: "Question about "Licensed" toys. It appears that a more & more toys have some character or personality on them. Not that you can not find some without, but sometime the item you really like does. Anyway what are your suggestions as to what would be OK if it came to that?"

I replied: "We try not to get toys with characters on them. If you do get
something, Sesame Street is usually fine. Dora the Explorer is okay.
Hello Kitty/Sanrio is okay, too. It's easier to say what we shun
altogether: Barbie, Bratz, Hannah Montana. Please don't buy Barbie or
any of those. We also try to stay away from Disney princess stuff, but
among the bad, Disney princess is better."

The exchange highlights something that I think about A LOT - toys and television.

It's very frustrating to me that toys and television are so closely linked these days. Every item that is available for children is available in as some kind of licensed product. The insidiousness works both up and down. We went looking for a toothbrush and all the toothbrushes are branded. I let her (3 yo) pick out her own toothbrush. From among them all she chose a Disney princess toothbrush - despite having no exposure to the princess movies or other products at home. Since she doesn't know that there are princess movies or other toys she hasn't asked for them, but I am sure it will happen sooner than later. She has friends, they watch TV, they play with princesses, she's smart, she'll figure it out and then she'll want to watch princesses. And then there's the hook that works the other way, from TV show to licensed product. If she watches the TV show of say Curious George (which we allow her to watch, mostly on DVD) then she'll be more inclined to want toys with Curious George on them.

I know that there is a futility to all this. She will get older. She will watch TV that I don't like. She will own toys that I don't like. Yet, I have to feel that pushing against those things and holding them off as long as possible is a good thing. The truth is that I find her toys that aren't covered in cartoon characters. Not all toys must be made of molded plastic. The point of this is to avoid training her to consume what she sees on TV.