Was I BU telling a woman not to speak to my son?

[Spinoni]

I realise I might be. But in the moment I was so annoyed.

In Sainsbury’s with DD 8 months and DS4
Son wants to go down toy isle- we don’t often to to Sainsburys so he was overly excited. As all 4 year olds are while looking for toys!

Go to the isle, he is looking and I noticed the ‘ boy ‘ toys were down the next isle.
By boy toys I mean toys I know he likes toys he has toys he’s into and toys that are quite frankly marketed at boys.
Me - ‘ ooo look DS name the boys toys are over here ‘
Interfering woman down isle to my son - ‘ you know you can play with whatever you want let your mummy know that ‘

FIRSTLY I was annoyed that I’m not ‘ forcing ‘ him to ‘ boys ‘ toys. It’s stuff I know he wants.
SECONDLY why even say anything?

The thing I massively regret is saying anything.
I said pardon?
And she replied ‘ Sorry it was just the way you said boys toys - when he can play with whatever he wants he shouldn’t be told their just for boys ‘

I replied probably not too politely telling her to mind her own business and I’ll parent how I want to and walked away.
And I could then hear her and another customer talking about me saying how rude I was ?
Was I BU?
I feel mortified I just was angry that something I said was interpreted as me forcing my son into something it’s ridiculous

Is not sexism to call toys targeted to boys boy's toys. Thats what they are. That being right or wrong is personal opinion, believing something is wrong doesnt make it so.

Of course labelling toys as for girls or boys is sexist! Children should be free to play with whatever they want- without any adult constraints being put on them. They are very aware and sensitive and easily influenced by trusted adults.

Curious to know, those of you who support what this woman did, how many of you would be okay with another parent walking over to you putting your 2 year old in their forward facing carseat and berating you for it not being rear facing until 4 as its safer? How many of you would be okay with someone telling you not to formula feed because breast is better? How many of you would like someone telling you not to put x y and z food in your shopping trolley because it isn't healthy enough? Or if your child has a tantrum in public would you appreciate a stranger standing over you telling you how to deal with it when you're getting it under control yourself? How would you feel if another parent came over to you at the doctors office and urged you to not vaccinate your child when you've made that sensible choice for your own baby? How would you feel if a stranger asked your toddler to "remind mummy that cloth nappies are better for the environment than the disposable ones she just put in the trolley"?

I have a feeling all of you would respond with similar annoyance or even a heartfelt 'f* off'.

Exactly @Vshoe

I'm astonished at how much grief the OP is getting. Apparently it's fine for strangers to speak to a child about his mother's wording, as long as it's not to those posters and about something they agree with.

Such a lack of empathy here. And as I said before, I don't like gendered toys either. The same posters who've said they'd have said something to OP too, would go nuts if a stranger they didn't agree with approached their child about it, I'm sure.

MY children are teenagers and this gender neutral toy craze is all a recent thing
It's not new. People are having to call it that to point out that all the moves towards more equality and reducing stereotypes are actually being clawed back by people with a vested interest in keeping everyone fitting in the pink and blue boxes.

I'm not a teenager and if you look at Argos catalogues from the 80s or early 90s there's some more stereotypical boy/girl toys but most were just toys. Toys for kids. It wasn't called gender neutral because at this point nobody was suggesting that kids with different genitals needed different toys.

Want a science set? Great here it is.
Want a spirograph? Great here it is.
Want Lego? Oh look here it is.
Want action man? Still there.
Want Barbie? Still there.
Play with what you like, sure girls would tend to play with Barbie and boys would play with action man and that's cool because nobody ever really believed everyone was identical.

What do we have now?
Story books saying "for boys" and "for girls" on them with pirates / princesses etc placed accordingly
Ditto for colouring books and sticker books
Girl toys are a sea of pink and purple
Boy toys are blue and black
Often there'll be different versions of the same product but in two different colours depending on your genitals.

Then look further:
Pom bear crisps for boys and pom bear crisps for girls in the correct colours obviously
Cheese squares / cheese strings for boys and girls, yes the label tells you which cheese is for you
Two identical sweet products. The boy one says 'tough guy' and the girl one says 'little princess'.

Vs
Early 90s = here's your chesse, look at these colouring pencils that can be used by anyone, have a pick n mix in a pick n mix tub.

I’ve seen lost of ads with both sexes playing with the advertised toy in question.

How often do you see boys playing with barbies and girls with action figures? 1 ad out of 1000?

YABU in so far as you are clearly steering him in the direction of boys toys but are then denying it because people are largely disagreeing with you and it makes you uncomfortable.

You've already admitted he plays with the toys you buy for him but also plays with "girls toys", then you continue to deny he has an interest in these toys which he clearly DOES, so you are either haven't recognised the interest or are unwilling to entertain it.

Was the woman rude? No.

Was she inappropriate? Yes.

She should have kept her opinion to herself: why the public feel it's their duty to correct others is probably down to social media: think how many rude or blunt comments you see on here.

Don't let it bother you. She's no one.

sweary post alert

I don’t give two shiney shits what toys are for which gender, what I do care about is people thinking they have a god damn right to tell me how to parent my child! I’m fed up of people interfering with their shitty opinions. I’d of had two words to whisper to her as I walked past - fuck off!

This wouldn’t happen though as I would of referred to them as ‘the toys you like’ instead of boys/girls toys

What if a little girl was looking at the same toys? You've effectively told her she likes boy's toys. And if your son sees a girl playing with them his thought will be "she's playing with boy's toys". So yes, you are giving him a gendered message. Better to say "the toys you like" rather than use boy or girl.
And if you think this is silly or doesn't matter, have a look at the research that shows the effects of such continual messages ...

@Vshoe only a handful of people have said they would say something, a majority are disagreeing with her defending the sentiment.

If shops arranged their toys by age appropriation and not gender then this argument could be solved.

Agree that it's a recent thing for everything to be so rigidly gendered. 70s 80s toys were also more neutrally presented and marketed. 50s and 60s toys the marketing was fairly gendered. So this is a regressive step.

However I agree that very young kids are completely oblivious. Around five or six they start taking notice ime and some may admonish others for playing with the 'wrong' toys; however this can be overcome by attitude of the people providing the toys whether parents or other childcare professionals. I don't know that that means you have to pretend that there are no differences in shops etc - 'boys' toys' is an accurate phrase in terms of store layout and marketing and using it doesn't necessarily mean you are preventing your child from certain play experiences - access to which is a lot wider than labels.

Plus, there is literally no point in having a go at strangers in shops about it, particularly if all you have to offer is a glib platitude trotted out in response to a phrase used accurately which in itself tells you little about a parent's entire attitude and what is being made available to the child.

YANBU
She was very patronising.

Not her job to preach to your DS.
I would have told her it was none of her business.

milk you are still spectacularly missing the point.

Children, even 3 year olds, do not make these choices in a vacuum. They, and their parents, some of whom unfortunately buy into it, like the OP and others on this thread, are bombarded with media telling them that this is for girls and that is for boys.

A child growing up in society in 2019 will not ever be making a completely free choice with regards to their toys. Entrenching this, as the OP and others think is fine to do, indeed should be encouraged, is not a good thing at all. For some children who have ASD, their thinking can be very rigid indeed and lead to possibly dire consequences, should they be a boy who prefers ‘girl’ things.

I am absolutely appalled that so many people on this thread can’t see the issue.

I get fed up of this boys/girls nonsense. There are toys for boys and for girls and yes they can play with either but it shouldn't be right or wrong how you refer to them. When we were growing up they were boys or girls toys and now we're getting called out if we forget to point out that children can play with anything. The new gender reveal trend uses blue or pink... How is that different??? Shouldn't these kits all just be white confetti if we apply the neutral logic?

I think its weird that people still say things like 'boys toys' my children are all grown up & I didn't use words like 'girls' or ' boys' things - including clothes.
This woman did have a point but maybe the boy was playing with the girls toys & OP redirected him to the 'boys' stuff... feel like we're missing a bit of context. I don't think I would've said anything unless I knew the person or was already engaged in a conversation. I'm sure she didn't mean to be rude though.

Tommo all the blue pink crap is part of the same issue. It's unnecessary labelling.

Yes children should play with what they like.

Calling stuff boys or girls toys makes this difficult for some kids or some parents. People seem to miss this fact when they are stating that their kids play with whatever they like. Just as in other discussions about sexism you will get people saying they've never encountered it or let it stop them. That completely omits the fact that many people are affected or struggle with it.

And no I wouldn't have said anything. I would have just thought ☹️🙄

It's just commerce though. Companies spend millions hiring people to work out how to sell things to us and yes of course the methodology they use isn't beneficial to any of their customers - from web profiling to neighbourhood targeting to cross selling to gendered toys and all the rest of it. It's not designed to be. Companies aren't here to make our lives better. Many of the things they produce do that, yes, but their primary aim is to get as much money out of us as possible. Corporations aren't your friends and they aren't agents for social change - they literally just want your money. Imo the mistake is forgetting that.

She was rude I wouldn’t have liked a stranger talking to my child and YANBU. I generalise boys and girls things as when I was little I had dolls my brother had trains and cars, yes we might have swapped but girls had dolls and boys had cars that’s just the way it was 30 years ago (but what seems like 100 years ago as we now live in a world where we cannot simply be a boy or girl ) but my son has had a doll and pushchair and has also had sylvanian yoga which are found in the girly section of the toy shop. Why do people get on their soap box (as I probably am lol) about boy/girl comments like this?? We don’t come out been gender neutral we have one or the other, OP we’ll done for telling the interfering shopper

Sylvanian toys*

Tbh I'm not sure I agree with you. We're all male or female, yes, but an object doesn't have a sex. If a boy is playing with a doll, the doll is a boy's toy. Can't be anything else, because a boy is playing with it. Saying that it's intrinsically a boy's toy while it's just sat on the shelf doing nothing and not being played with by anyone isn't accurate in that sense; it's just referring to it by the label that the manufacturer uses to get your money off you. Which is fine and accurate as far as it goes because that's what the catalogue says; it's when you start thinking that the phrases used in the catalogue have some kind of eternal unchanging truth behind them that you might want to question where these words are coming from.

I would have probably told her to mind her own damn business. You were talking to your own child.
Unfortunately nowadays, people are falling over themselves to appear cool, modern and tolerant.

It's a ridiculous suggestion that kids automatically prefer pink crap versus blue crap.

I totally disagree with with this. My DD has automatically gravitated to all things pink and baby's. I've bought her quite a mix of toys since she was born but she would still choose these items over her cars.

And you don't think you've had any influence over her choice at at all ?