Toys aren't us - the malign effect of ads on child development.

[Treaclemine]

Ok, I had to give it a serious title.
A few minutes ago I was fettling a new set of wireless headphones by the TV, as one does, checking the settings and the battery charge - that's to show my feminist background - when there burst upon my eyes and ears a sickening sight and sound. A string of toy adverts, all for girls, in colours of bright pastels, worse than My Little Ponies, accompanied by exciting sounds from real little girls. There were fashion dolls with monstrous hair, some blue, which I can only describe as drag-like in appearance. There were baby dolls, some assigned girl, some boy at removal from the box, weighted so they handled like babies. Some of them drank water, which they then could expel from their tear ducts, or fill their nappies with for changing, or fill their pot with after training*. There were fake plastic cakes in fake plastic kitchens for fake plastic friends to pop round and share. There was a superabundance of anime eyes. It was all designed to keep girls focussed on girlishness and female futures. It was sickening. I haven't been in a toy shop for yonks. Are they all like this? And is it part of some plan to get us all to kowtow to the people trying to erase us as humans? I thought, when my nieces were young, this sort of stuff was being challenged.
*To be honest, when I was coming up to three, I would have liked a doll with working functions like that, and I was very put out when my sister, whose baby treatment I was trying to imitate with my baby doll, got an updated version of the same type with actual holes. But the plethora of baby stuff on display in this ad was horrendous.
I have a great nephew and niece I shall need to give things to. Are there sources of brain feeding stuff still?

I forgot the Purse Pets, handbags with Hello Kitty eyes which blinked.

Take a look at the Let Toys Be Toys campaign and their FB page.

And turn off commercial TV when kids are around. They can watch cbeebies or carefully selected stuff online. No need for the constant shite bombardment of ad breaks 🤢

No kids involved here, it was just on to check the audio. Can't recall what channel. But good advice.

The purse pets are quite disturbing, aren't they!

There are loads of great toys out there. I'm afraid I see this dismissal of pinks and purples as internalised mysogyny. Sorry! Why do you see those as less valid colours than blues and reds? Likewise, dragons and dinosaurs aren't better than unicorns and kittens. Without realising, we see things aimed at boys as 'better' , simply because our society values things associated with males above things associated with females. All these things are absolutely fine, and children should be free to choose toys which appeal to them.

Some girls do prefer lego friends to lego transformer. So what? Building develops their 3D visualisation and fine motor skills, and playing with their creation develops their imagination and empathy - whether it's a dinosaur or a turtle hospital.

https://amzn.eu/d/bGRbAXQ Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine is a great read. She's a neuroscientist and she re-examines loads of experiments, to explore what differences between girls and boys are genuinely intrinsic. Interestingly, she finds that the only real inherent difference is play preference. However the amount of time spent playing in a particular way builds associated skills and interest. Her conclusion is that we should encourage both boys and girls to play with all the different types of toys - despite their different preferences - in order to build all the different skills. If you can tap into a girl's preferences (whether colour or subject matter) to make a particular type of toy appealing when it wouldn't otherwise be, then I think that's all good.

Oh, and STEM stuff is generally much more gender neutral than it was when I was a kid, and there are some amazing STEM kits and subscription boxes available. Look at snap circuits and MEL science boxes for a start..

She's not dismissing pinks and purples. Just pointing out that there were only pinks and purples. That's the issue.

Couldn't help but laugh bitterly over the placement of this immediately beneath the Mumsnet Lego advert!

I didn't mention pinks and purples, I mentioned bright pastels, memory is supplying turquoise as one of the colours. They were like a pastel version of migraine aura.

I get what you are saying OP, 'tis horrible, but @JustWaking has made some very good points. Think of it like supermarket shopping - some will go for the highly processed, some will take a bit of both while others will be purely organic.

I noticed with mine that their preference for Barbie (which was a gift btw 😉) was down to the fact that they could manuipulate her - the plastic was not too hard and she fit in their hands. Ken and Barbie were interchangeable.

I second turning off live television. Ours got streaming only and we got a lot less pestering - an example of ignorance being bliss ....sometimes!