Girls/Boys toys

[IWantMyHatBack]

AIBU to think there's no such thing...

the image has all the information required to answer your question.

Drives me mad when people buy there babies and toddler girls the pink version of everything as if it will poison them to have a multicoloured one, or avoid a pink toy because they have a boy. Who cares what it looks like. It’s a toy.

of course YANBU like the diagram.

When people say "girls or "boys" toys these days I think they just mean toys that are traditionally associated with girls or boys. They are not (in most cases) saying that is still or should be the case.

"but my daughter likes playing shop!"

When my eldest was a baby, the classic parental torture device (otherwise known as the VTech walker) was only available in bright colours.

Love that poster.
Is it wrong that I want to print out thousands of them, and then paste them on to the frontages of all toy shops ?

Oh, please do!

(it's one of my favourite things)

I'm autistic, so I think that has an impact on how I see gender... But I'm over 40, so my childhood was bikes, lego and helping dad with DIY.

Disney Princesses have a lot to answer for.

Yanbu.
On our local fb pages you get
'Moses basket wanted for a boy'
' High chair for a girl for sale'
Etc etc
Wtf

"girl's bike"

This pisses me off no end. The poster is completely right.

The other day at playgroup, my DD (aged 2.5) insisted on getting the trains out and played with them for a good 45 minutes. We'd only just moved on and started exploring the toy kitchen when another mother comes over with her DS of similar age, plonks him down with the trains, clocks my DD with the plastic food and says something like "Aw, sweet. Isn't it funny how early gender differences start to show? DS is such a little boy. He's obsessed with vehicles". There's so much confirmation bias involved. Sometimes I swear that DD is only visible to other people if she's wearing pink, doing pretend play or holding a stuffed toy.

Whilst I agree that there is no such thing as girl/boy toys, I have noticed that most of the girls and boys I know are drawn to toys that would stereotypically be associated with their sex. I know people will suggest confirmation bias, exposure to different toys etc and of course I accept that there will be an element of this, but I honestly believe that sometimes the stereotypes hold true and there is nothing wrong with that.

My concern is that in a bid to relax attitudes about girl/boy toys and breakdown stereotypes we risk demonising stereotypical girls toys. I say this as the vast majority of examples of children breaking down gender norms seems to focus on girls liking traditional boys things and rarely vice versa. Sometimes it all seems a bit misogynistic to me, where "unisex" actually means male things that girls are encouraged to use whilst girly things are deemed inferior.

We had very similar last year at a family party needsleep as DS headed initially for the Duplo. 10 minutes later he found his cousins toy pushchair and spent the next hour pushing teddies round the house in it.

I've also just had an apologetic text from a family member saying that the wrapping paper on DS's birthday present is in the "wrong" paper (pink Happy Birthday writing not blue) and I should feel free to rewrap it.....