Are we limiting our little girls?

There is perhaps an education inherent in having first a male child and then a female. From the earliest days, I wondered whether I subconsciously treated my daughter differently from my son. Did I handle her more gently? Treat her tears with more sympathy? Encourage her with the same zest to test her physical limitations on the playground?

A fascinating aspect of this has emerged as my daughter heads toward her second birthday, and the three of us spend more time playing together. Because my son is the oldest, most of the toys we have are his, and he also tends to determine the direction of our play. At the moment we most often pretend-play with Thomas the Tank Engine, Imaginext's outer space toys, and Octonauts (a team of cartoon characters who have underwater adventures).

As my daughter plays along with my son, she obviously does not have the gender self-consciousness yet to note that of the many, many Thomas trains he has, only a couple are "girl" trains. Of the eight Octonauts, two are female, and these two don't seem to participate in the action like the primary three (male) Octonauts do (though, I suppose, a shout-out is in order to the girl bunny who is an engineer). Of the eight Imaginext figures my son has accumulated, who drive the various airplanes, vehicles, and space shuttle, none is female. When I checked the Imaginext website, just thinking maybe I could find my daughter some kind of Imaginext figure of her own for her birthday, I discovered that there are no females in the world of Imaginext--not even among the Cars and Toy Story Imaginext toys. It just means that when she gets older, and realizes that she is a girl, she will also realize that Imaginext adventures are for boys, and she will have to pretend to be a boy if she wants to continue to play along with her brother.

If you scroll down the list of preschooler toys on the Fisher Price website, it's clear that toys are strongly segregated, even though preschoolers themselves don't seem to segregate themselves yet in their play--"boy" toys are often about imagining adventures and building things, while "girl" toys seem limited to role play about cooking and taking care of babies. Why would we push such young kids to imagine in only one direction like that? Why not play house one day, and then imagine space missions the next day?

Last spring I read a book called Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes. In six chapters, the authors evaluate the ways in which marketing messages target girls' ideas of themselves (from toddlerhood through adolescence) in the areas of clothing, television and movies, music, books, and toys/recreational activities in order to sell them products. They conclude by offering suggestions for age-appropriate conversations to help our daughters learn from an early age to consider critically the marketing messages they will consume throughout their lives.

The authors noted the strong dichotomy between girls' and boys' toys as well, in much greater detail. For example, in their review of board game covers, twice as many boys as girls are shown in action playing the game (girls usually shown "watching, waiting, reacting, catching, or poised to act"), and only boys or male characters were ever shown winning the game (p. 222).

Even though the book is five years old and a little dated, I recommend it for the sake of parents building up some critical thinking skills in this area, and for realizing that it's not so much about undertaking the Herculean task of keeping our daughters away from these things, but teaching them to approach them wisely, as appropriate, and with critical eyes.

The book made me turn a critical eye even on my own childhood play, the shows I watched, and the inherent messages. My 80s cartoon fare, from Superfriends to GI Joe to Smurfs, often revolved around a team of boys with one or two token girls, who served as love interests for good guys and objects of attraction for bad guys. I never stopped to think about whether in my own mind I had developed a way of thinking that implies that I need to be attractive to men in order to be of value or included in life's adventures.

Well, I'm about to descend into a rant that might be regrettable, so I'll end it by saying that as a Christian woman the true source of my value (my daughter's value!) has everything to do with the love of God, who values us at the cost of his Son's life. As for Imaginext, I can't force them to make female pilots, but I can let my daughter play along, and, when she's old enough, give her this earful directly.