Toys R Us (photos attached)

[toastcollective]

Hope I'm posting in the right place, I don't actually have any children myself but I've been shopping for my new niece today. Had a wander round Toys R Us and couldn't quite believe what I saw (I've attached pics)

Would be really interested to hear your thoughts. I'm sure its been ages since shops stopped splitting things by gender? I remember seeing on the news ages ago that Boots, Toys R Us etc were stopping all of this 'boys toys' and 'girls toys' nonsense. I appreciate the signs are neutral now like toy brands or categories 'science' 'arts and crafts' but it is so ridiculously obvious that the toys are gendered it makes me think why on earth they even bothered getting rid of the signs!

If a child spent just 5 mins in this shop even without being bought a toy they would leave will a million stereotypical ideas about gender :(

I agree about Lego friends, but apparently it sells extremely well?
You see this in a lot in the high street shops, unfortunately. The shops who do the gender neutral toys very well tend to be more niche and expensive and perhaps not as accessible for some people, the Steiner/Waldorf shops also do this very well.

It depends if the children are told they can't like a certain toy or colour because of their sex.
One of my boys heads straight to the doll aisle as that's what he likes, my other boy loves Lego, trains, tools etc.
They have always had very different interests and I have never told them they can't do or play with something based on their sex.

Oh yawn man! Seriously?

It annoys me when people go on about lego friends. They played to the market and made money. The boxes are purple. Not pink. Pink were disney princess and that would've been dictated by disney.

Why is lego city blue? And all bloody police and firefighters and rescue? Before friends lego was predominantly 'boy' sets. Endless Starwars, ben 10, bionicle, Atlantis, chima, ninjago.....yet only uproar about friends?

I love the new variety of brick colours and parts that have come about since friends launched that can all be mixed/ used together.
If a boy wanted a lego friends set then the only issue would be the parent telling them it's for boys. Not the contents of the box. The (blue) roller coaster and funfair sets are fantastic.

The lego elves sets are also amazing. So what if they are in a different aisle.

Girls are different than boys , and they like different games, toys crafts etc
As a parent to boys and girls , I know this
They are different from birth

Absolute nonsense, your children maybe, but not all girls and boys

OP, I totally get what you are saying and think this colour coding is meant to/does indicate to both children and parents which toys are meant for girls and which for boys. And this is reductive and wrong imho.

The boxes are purple. Not pink

They're usually down the pink aisle and not with the other Lego (though pink is to be found amongst the contents of the box, if you're concerned with colour). Discussed on these threads before, but that shade of purple is usually found in the girls' aisle. Boy colours include green, blue, black, orange.

Dolls etc are still mainly in pink packaging while hot wheels etc are blue. Shops could categorise differently by having imaginative toys of all kinds for eg in one aisle but there would still be distinct shelves of pink or blue unless the toys were placed randomly. There's only so much toy shops can do if you manufacturers aren't going to change packaging.

Funny how it’s only grownups who are bothered by all this ‘gender stereotyping’. Kids don’t give a monkeys.

It's colour. Get over it. My kids (both girls) don't actually give a damn about what colour means.

Well young kids might not be able to articulate that it bothers them the same way but I've certainly had times where my kids have been in shops and clearly wanted a toy that was aimed at the opposite sex but not chosen it so it does restrict what kids feel they should play with.

And be never said any toys are for boys or girls but when they are labelled that way in a lot of shops and other kids tell them it's for boys or it's for girls it has an impact.

Jesus wept.
I can't believe this post.
Is this really what the world is coming to?
Girls like boys and girl toys.
Boys like girl and boys toys.
But more often than not boys will be attracted to the boys toys and girls attracted to girls toys.
A couple of decades of trying to get rid of gender based sterotypes cannot change bloody DNA.
Girls and boys are different - why can't people just accept that ???

@yorkshireyummymummy you hit the nail on the head . With everything going on in the world, I can't believe someone will start a thread toys display in a shop

"Girls are different than boys , and they like different games, toys crafts etc
As a parent to boys and girls , I know this
They are different from birth"

You aren't allowed ideas like that around here!

qz.com/826748/the-math-gender-gap-between-girls-and-boys-starts-in-kindergarten-and-is-largely-driven-by-teachers-biases/
Boys and girls are not that different, and such small differences as there are are probably down to nature rather than nurture. By about seven years old girls start to think (thanks to wider culture) that they are not as good at maths as boys - even though there's no factual basis for this belief. This erroneous belief (see link) is then reinforced by wider culture including, sadly, the attitudes of parents and teachers - at which point it becomes a self- fulfilling prophecy.

Those of you blithely saying "well girls just are different" - are you really happy with limiting the aspirations of your daughters? Do you really want to cut them off from the possibility of careers in science, engineering, finance, all the jobs that need maths? Are you really happy to limit the possibilities for your sons and cut them off from careers in creative or caring professions?

I just don't get why you'd want to put all these artificial limitations on your children.

I am with you op and I think you are getting a hard time on here. My eldest dd is 27 and my youngest is 8 and I have seen a massive change in the way toys are marketed. Our big toy store is smyths and there is a long aisle of pink sparkly stuff and a long aisle of mostly blue sciencey type stuff. Ime most boys won't set foot in the girls pink aisle, and most girls, including my dd, won't set foot in the boys blue aisle. A lot of pp have said it's not the shops fault that the packaging is pink or blue, but they don't have to group the colours together so aggressively. It's the same in the toy shop's and argos's brochures, the 'girly' stuff is all grouped together and played with by girl models, the construction and sciencey stuff is grouped together and being played with almost exclusively by boy models . It's a successful marketing ploy in that parents end up spending more money as toys are less likely to be passed on if the younger child is a different sex to the older one, especially as kids get older and are more influenced by the media. The world has become so gendered since my elder dc were little, it does influence and limit children's choices, I think it's very sad.

If toys were packaged without using gender stereotyped colours and without being labelled 'for boys' and 'for girls' it would go a long way towards kids being able to choose freely though. Of course you will still get some people who say dolls are for girls etc but thankfully that attitude is becoming less popular. No issue with girls playing with dolls and boys playing with trucks but if a boy wants to play with a doll but is put off because it's in the girls section or because someone says it's a girls toy I think that is sad.

I'm with you OP. YANBU. This really pisses me off too.

Quarks (love the name btw) mentioned the BBC doc "no more boys and girls". Anyone who thinks stereotyping isn't damaging needs to watch that programme.

Another poster said their DD was told she couldn't be a doctor because she's a girl. My DD told me the same thing herself.

The mum of a friend of mine was asked in an interview (teaching) 'why girls aren't as good at maths as boys?' Her daughter was doing a maths degree so the interviewer was put right.

Went into a petrol station today, they had loads of ice scrapers last week, split pretty evenly between blue, pink, yellowy green &orange. Now they have almost sold out of blue and pink (had about two of each left) but still had loads of the green and orange. I said something to the staff about it and they said loads of people go 'oh my daughter might need one' and grab a pink one or 'I'll get one for the husband' so grab a blue one. As a nation we have been conditioned to adhere to these stereotypes.

Thanks ShakeMuffin!

Cordelia Fine, a neuroscientist has an excellent book called Delusions of Gender which utterly disproves the pink / blue brain myth that was so pushed by the Victorians and remains believed in today.

Quite a few previous posters have said that their children conformed to the stereotypes of their sex and hold this as proof that boys and girls are different from birth. Cordelia Fine proves in her book that actually male & female brains only gain differences through time based on how they are used. This is called plasticity. Basic principle is that babies and young children have millions more brain pathways than adults.

Depending on how the child is treated & what experiences they have the brain prunes back those that aren’t used (Use it or lose it) and enlarges those that are used.

So, children who are spoken to more for example will gain skills in language before a child who is ignored.

What is also proved in the book is that despite us believing ourselves to hold certain liberal beliefs about not treating male & female babies / children and adults differently, we actually behave in very ingrained sexist ways that are almost impossible to unshackle ourselves from.

So, previous posters may believe they’ve treated their boy and girl children the same but they most likely have preened them in highly specific ways according to their sex. Hence, their children then behaving as they have described.

People may ask what the problem with girls and boys being pushed in these ways if they enjoy it. The reality is that it reduces the options of enjoyable fulfilling careers for women, means they’ll earn less and will focus to a huge extent on their outward appearance as being important to their happiness. This is why girls suffer from eating disorders way more than boys along a range of other problems spurred on by society making them see their worth primarily as objects to look at.

Pink and blue separated toys is a big part of the problem

which utterly disproves the pink / blue brain myth

Does it? The author herself doesn't say it disproves it

The thesis of my book (no veils required) is that while social effects on sex differences are well-established, spurious results, poor methodologies and untested assumptions mean we don’t yet know whether, on average, males and females are born differently predisposed to systemizing versus empathising

@QuarksandLeptons

It does nothing of the sort. Have you read it?

She offers nothing except saying everything else is wrong. No proof, no theories, just badly written pop-science for an echo-chamber audience.

As for as I can see and NO point whatsoever does toyrus label these aisles as boys or girls.

It is YOUr interpretation.

And your qualifications in neuroscience are what, fricative?

Cordelia Fine is a neuroscientist who writes popular science books as a sideline, just as Brian Cox is a particle physicist who makes popular science programmes as a sideline. Fine has just won the Royal Society prize for best popular science book this year. There was a widely shared critical blog-post about her latest book (which sounds very like fricative's post), which was so egregious that one of the judges on the Royal Society panel actually took the time to write a critique of it explaining why the criticisms were unfounded.

For those who are interested in this subject, rather than simply confirming their own belief that boys and girls are intrinsically different, I can also recommend Lise Elliott's Pink Brain, Blue Brain. She's another neuroscientist with a research specialism in plasticity of brain development in early childhood. Her central thesis is that insofar as there are any measurable differences by adulthood, the d-values are tiny, and that infant brains are so plastic, and the way adults treat children according to sex are so different that there's no way we could disentangle nature and nurture in the end result.

Finally, here is my favourite graph on d-values. For any cognitive differences that have been measured, d is less than 0.5. In contrast, d for an obviously sexually dimporphic characteristic like height is about 2 - and even then, there are significant numbers of women who will be above the average male height.