We’re excited to launch a new editor’s column called Thinking: Parent, for common sense conversations about parenting issues we care about. Complete with random pop culture references.
This week, I’ve seen a lot of shares of a set of fantastic photos from A Mighty Girl, featuring a friend’s daughter turning a LEGO Friends Juice Bar Set into a cool robot.
My fourth-grade daughter, Thalia, who just spent 10 straight hours on Saturday in the NYC semi-finals of the First LEGO League Robotics Competition (says the proud mom), hardly glanced at it before raving, Awesome!
And it is! Majorly awesome.
Related: Are LEGO Friends good for girls?
The original
The result
However when I take a look at the comments circulating about the post, they’re starting to bum me out.
I think the issue is best exemplified in the headline of a Cult of Mac article (thanks for the tip, Kim) called Girl Turns Boring LEGO Juice Bar Into Awesome Robot; and language which I think progressive, gender-issue aware parents like me are increasingly programmed to use.
“Boring LEGO Juice Bar.”
Boring? Says who?
Have you ever sat down and watched a creative child play by herself or himself with a set of LEGO Friends? I can sneak in on my second-grader for just a few minutes and it’s captivating. She’s not limited by the set in front of her or the photo on the box, only by her imagination.
The writer of the Cult of Mac article is a dad of two, and I don’t think he intended any malice. In fact, I think it’s absolutely wonderful to see a male tech writer giving girls props for their robot-designing and construction skills. I think he’s just doing what a lot of us do — me included — in a noble effort to crusade against gender-specific toys and the pink aisle and the perceived limitations in toys marketed to girls: We put down the so-called girls toys.
We deem a juice bar play “boring” or “girlie” or “lame” relative to robots or alien fighters or astronauts or Minecraft or pretty much anything else, and that sends a strong message to kids.
When we call the toys that girls like inferior, we’re actually telling girls that the way they play is inferior.
I think the coded language we use, without even realizing it, is actually more detrimental to girls in the long run than any single LEGO set at all — except perhaps the yet-to-be-released LEGO Very Special Friends: Orange Is the New Black Shower Room Set.
Kidding.
As far as I’m concerned, inferior toys have nothing to do with pinks or purples. Inferior toys are those that fall apart in two seconds. Inferior toys promise more than they deliver. (My Evil Knievel doll of my own youth never managed to jump that stupid ramp on his motorcycle like in the commercial, damn him.) Inferior toys ruin your carpet or hurt kids or just look so creepy that you sneak them into the Goodwill bag when your kids are off at school and hope they forget about them. Ahem.
While am proud to call myself a feminist, once upon a time I would have condemned so-called girls’ toys too, but I’ve had a shift in my mindset over the past ten years (eep) of parenting, and I know that Kristen has too.
I always joke that now I’m not anti-princess, but pro-choice, and I hope that the toy recommendations you see here and on Cool Mom Tech reflect that. In other words, we no longer think “ew, princesses” but instead, “yay for princesses and blocks and STEM toys and cooking kits and fairy wings and black shoes with skulls on them and kits to get more kids building.”
In fact, Friends sets are probably a great gateway to LEGO Mindstorms that some girls might not otherwise have discovered. Or, maybe they’re a gateway to writing a huge hit sitcom about someone who owns a juice bar. You never know.
Of course I don’t love every single item in the Friends line. As I once said, I could live without a beauty shop and I admit I’d rather my girls pick the Jungle Tree Sanctuary over the Model Catwalk; though my girls are more inclined to choose Minecraft LEGO these days, as my December Amex bill will show you.
(I also understand this week’s justifiable outrage from parents towards the recent LEGO Club Magazine, after Sharon Holbrook’s NY Times column revealing a magazine feature on “beauty tips for girls” from Emma. When I think of all the fantastic things LEGO sets have done for my kids over the years, I doubt that we’ll somehow work “learned to accentuate my cheekbones with my haircut” into their Middle School applications.
Also, maybe next time, karate-expert Emma instead imparted tips about self-defense or stranger danger. Just a thought, LEGO.)
But as for the Friends sets overall, where they succeed so well is allowing girls to play the way they naturally play; girls don’t just want to build/destroy/repeat. They also want to create social situations, concoct ongoing storylines, develop communities, and use their imaginations.
In fact one of the reasons I came around to accepting Friends is that they play well with others. I asked my oldest daughter about them this morning and she told me a similar thing we hear from a lot of parents:
I mix my LEGO sets so there are a ton of people working together to fight the evil skeleton. So they build spaceships using all the extra pieces that I have that don’t really fit anywhere else.
The LEGO Minecraft Skeleton, defeated by Andrea and her exploding spaceship
My younger daughter likes to “make people dance” while Emma specifically paints and writes a blog at her computer, “just like you, Mom.”
(Sniff.)
How can I say that either of those ways of playing are inferior to the other? And how can I say that either is more or less “boring” than building a robot?
I admire how avidly progressive parents increasingly want to celebrate non-gendered toys, and I hope we’ve helped to encourage that here. But we should make sure — and I include myself here big time — that in giving our girls more play choices, we don’t put down all kinds of toys that they love.
I want to celebrate all the different ways my girls play and use their imaginations and creativity. And I want to tell this amazing robot-building girl that she should be so proud of how she used her imagination and building skills to create something totally unexpected and wonderful; not that she turned something bad into something good.
Because as Thalia explained to me, “LEGO Friends is cool! You can do parkour on it!”
I’m glad people are finally coming around to this, because those of us who consider ourselves feminists and also happen to have daughters who love all things pink and sparkly were feeling rather put-upon for a long time by the “Down with princesses!” crowd. I always got a lot more support for my son wanting a stroller and an Easy Bake Oven than for my daughter wanting Princess everything. Now if we can all just work on the toy companies to stop marketing all toys based on genitalia, we’ll be all set.
I love this post. I am a 40-something woman in a STEM field. I’ve made a career at the interface of biology, chemistry and computers. From that, you can probably guess that my work world is very male. I am married to an engineer and we have two daughters, ages 5 and almost 8. Given our backgrounds, it is no surprise that Duplo and LEGO are big toys in our house. What might be more surprising to some is that my older daughter loves cheerleading and my younger daughter is a huge fan of princesses. I struggled with this a bit in the early days of parenting- like so many people, I’d internalized the idea that these “girl” interests were somehow less worthy than the “boy” interests my kids also have- trains, dinosaurs, sports, and so on. I’m over that now, and embrace the full diversity of my kids’ interests.
There is a real problem in STEM circles with the trope of the “good woman”- i.e., women are OK, but only if they are “good,” and good means “just one of the guys.” Feminine things are still looked down on, if you wear too many dresses at work you won’t be taken seriously, and you certainly shouldn’t talk about how being a woman has made things harder for you. This creates real issues for women like me, who like feminine things and want to wear dresses. When I look back over my career, the times I’ve been closest to leaving my STEM path have been when I’ve been struggling to get to be the real me in an environment that doesn’t value some core aspects of who I really am. I think we set that culture up very early, starting with what interests we deem “cool.”
Now, there are some women who genuinely don’t want to wear dresses, and aren’t interested in the stereotypically feminine things. That’s fine. There should be room in STEM for all of us. But if “getting more women” into STEM only applies to women who act and dress in a certain way, then we aren’t really doing diversity right. We have to make room for people of all different types- and let them be who they really are. So, hooray for the little girl who built the robot our of her Friends set. But hooray as well for the little girls who build the bakery (a set we have, by the way) and use it as a basis for storytelling play. Both types of play build the skills that will support future interests in STEM, so lets not judge one to be “better” than the other.
As a mom of two girls – one of them a precocious, highly creative 10-year-old who indeed repurposes toys on a regular basis, I love this post — and Thinking: Parent.
Welcome home, Liz. Good to have you back writing in your own warm, passionate, and thoughtful way.
This is an excellent post. I began to re-think “pink” when I had my son and he wanted to wear his sister’s hand-me-down shirts. That shouldn’t be brave or weird, and I started to see my own scoffing over pink as misogynist. I really wish all the toys could just be toys. I would love to see all the human figure dolls in the same aisle–princesses and warriors alike–and all the cars together, and all the building sets together, etc. I think it harms kids to feel they are somehow choosing sides when they simply like a toy.
Yes! You’re so right on. Thank you for sharing your perspective. I’m sharing this, now.
Great article! In our house we love all Legos, including Friends and red and blue basics, and all dress up, including princesses and pirates. Barbies regularly share play time with Star Wars figures. I’ll never understand this idea of limiting our girls in the name of not limiting our girls.
I wrote a very similar post last week defending Lego Friends on The Nerds of Color. https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2015/03/11/whats-wrong-with-pink-bricks-in-defense-of-lego-friends/
Also, I’m a dad of a girl in second grade too.
Keith thank you so much for this! Jason Sperber pointed me toward it yesterday and I said I was thrilled to see dads getting in on the conversation. You sound like a fantastic father, and I am so happy to have found your site, and I hope the readers here will check out your article too.
I just went through this last weekend as I picked up minifigures for my son’s birthday and contemplated whether to just get the same thing for all 8 kids (including 2 girls), or try to find an alternate for the girls… I ended up getting 8 minifigs PLUS 2 My Little Pony minis to give them a choice, but ultimately felt guilty for thinking it was necessary :-/ THEN I went to lunch with my boy on Monday and as one of his classmates sat with us, she not only told me about Minecraft but also My Little Pony and I thought she was so cool (and maybe I wasn’t so bad to consider the options that may appeal to K-2nd grade girls).
I’m so glad the world of play is broadening 🙂
Thanks for sharing this perspective C.E. I understand completely. I want to give the birthday kids the things they want best, but I don’t want to lump them all together by gender either. Sometimes I put down the purse-making kit and think, “ooh…I bet she’d like a science kit.” But I completely admit it’s not always my first instinct.
And my daughter LOVES Minecraft and My Little Pony too! Evidently Steve and Fluttershy get along really well.
I agree. As a child who grew up with brothers, and lots of legos and many of my own, I loved them, but was always frustrated with the lack of females in general, the lack of color choices in general, and the block-ness of them. Some of the cool things the Lego friends have added to the line is a lot more curved pieces, a lot more color and a lot more females. I think this makes the resulting structures (which in our house are also a mix of all our sets) far more interesting and the overall Lego experience more fun. Many times we have had our girls playing with male friends or cousins where they boys are jealous of some of the cool pieces (awnings, windows, tigers!, zipline, balloon, etc.) which only come withe the Friends sets. I bought my nephew some friends set for his birthday and he loved them. There is nothing uncool about Friends, and just because it has pink and girls in it, doesn’t mean its only for girls. And the added bonus is now we are getting Legos for birthday gifts instead of Barbies.
Thank you so much for this perspective, Megan, it’s one I really haven’t heard before. A lot of moms complain that when we were kids, they liked that the sets were just blocky, gender-neutral, primary colored and without themes. The fact that you actually wanted more colors and shapes is really interesting.
It’s also why I like the LEGO Classics sets that now come with “bright bricks” which we recommended here: https://coolmompicks.com/ultimate-birthday-party-gift-guide/coolest-birthday-gifts-for-4-year-olds/ It’s everything we like about a theme-free set that encourages creative building, only with the very features you’re talking about. Or…maybe it’s not a coincidence! Do you have a direct line to someone at the top of LEGO? Ha.
I grew up with 3 older brothers who I played legos with and would have wished for Lego Friends honestly. My brother helped me make drive-thru restaurants, houses and stables for the town. Although I would have liked some more color with the pieces. I have a daughter now that plays with Ninjago but also loves her lego friends set. It’s okay to play both ways.
This is a great article and a really good point about how we think about traditionally “girly” interests. The juice-bar robot is impressive because of the creativity and skill of the girl who made it, taking one set and transforming it into something completely different (and awesome!) from the item in the instructions takes some skill! As for the juice bar being less cool than the robot- I don’t think it is, but I am not ashamed to say I would have preferred a pink robot to a juice bar when I was a little girl! (or possibly would have wanted both). I think most girls have some stereotypically girly toys and some less stereotyped ones, and that is okay.