Every year or two it seems like there’s a great debate about separating toys by gender. Whether it be blue or pink sections in toy stores, prizes in a kid’s meal, or even just the packaging, many have argued these distinctions can have adverse effects on a child’s development.
Personally, I always thought it was much a do about nothing. As long as the parents don’t make a big deal about it, why would the kid? Besides, the classifications were simply guidelines to make finding things easier. There’s no harm in that, right?
Now that I’m a dad, I had the displeasure of finding out I was, in fact, wrong.
Recently while waiting in the drive-thru line of a fast-food establishment (don’t judge), my four-and half-year-old daughter looked at me through the rear view mirror and said for the first time,and with conviction, “I don’t like boy toys. Boy toys are yucky.”
My heart broke.
See, in the past, whenever I would be asked if we wanted a girl toy or a boy toy,I simply picked the one that I knew my daughter would like the most. Sometimes it was the pony, sometimes it was the hero with the cape.
At home, she has always had full access to whatever toy she wanted, instructional in nature or just for fun. She’s equally a tease playing with her dollhouse as she is with her race cars.
She loves to look through comic books and play catch with the football just as much as she likes to take care of her toy horse. She is as eager to learn math as she is to start reading on her own.
She loves to wear dresses and skirts but prefers wearing t-shirts and comfy pants.Half her shirts come from the “boy sections” (HINT: they almost always have the cooler licensed character tees).
So even though her mother and I have done our best to let her figure out who she is and what she likes, something shifted her way of thinking before we pulled up to order dinner that night.
Something that fundamentally changed her worldview on what was OK for her to play with and what wasn’t. Yes,her sweeping declaration was in response to the “girl or boy toy” question but her attitude about it had been preformed before it was asked.
She has no reply as to how and why she came to form her new opinion. My wife and I both think something must have happened at school — a classmate, boy or girl, probably said something to divide the gender lines of play.
Or maybe, as her young brain develops, she’s picking up the gender divisions on her own.
Now that I’m more aware myself, especially near the holiday shopping season, the more ridiculous and prevalent they seem.
Back to the drive-thru, all I could do that night was mentally repair my heart,grip the steering wheel,take a deep breath, and try to explain there really isn’t anything different between a boy toy and a girl toy.
I told her that she could still play with whatever she wanted, just like she always has. She didn’t say much on the way home but she didn’t seem convinced.
Since then, I still don’t have all the answers and I’m not convinced going all gender neutral is the way to go. And yet, I worry my daughter will already suppress part of who she is, just because of some silly marketing distinction.
I say “silly” because when your daughter suddenly thinks it’s not OK to play with trucks anymore, one hardly cares what the sales data charts show in some CEO’s boardroom.
Thankfully, my daughter’s altered attitude hasn’t had much affect at home or in practice, though she recently repeated her new mantra to her mother during our bedtime routine.
This time it hurt worse watching my wife’s heartbreak.