January again and another photo for comparison of how Amelia is stretching. Taken this morning after she allowed me to brush *and* put her hair up. She’s having some orange juice ahead of a fun day with the childminder.
January, 2012
9
Jan 12
Speaking As Me
If you are on a social networking site you may may have seen the following:
in response to Lego’s new ‘Friends’ product line, decrying their current strategy to market to girls.
Speaking for myself* I’m actually getting rather fed up of this as I have more of an issue the context in which the advert is being used. It is being said now, that the above 1981 advertisement is a better way of marketing Lego to girls (and let’s be honest here, toys are also being marketed to their parents and those buying for children, who may not be their own and/or they don’t know very well).
However it is worth remembering that 30 years ago this was how Lego as a toy to engage creativity was marketed; Star Wars and the merchandising tie-in model it helped spawned was very much in its infancy so Lego was pretty much that ideal basic we remember from our youths.
So now we have taken against Lego Friends with it’s Pinky Purple Heartlake city with its girly girls who like to socialise, play sports, do a spot of shopping and aspire to be vets, and designers and engineers…
Wait, what?
Yes, indeed Olivia who enjoys hanging out with her friends likes Maths and Science and believes that no problem is too difficult, you just need to figure it out!
As back stories go for a toy isn’t that something to be applauded?
As for the lionisation of the 1981 advert, this is how Lego should be marketed to all children regardless of gender. That Lego is trying to tap into the Polly Pocket/Barbie players with Lego Friends isn’t a sign of the apocalypse, rather it serves as an introduction to girls who might not be bought Lego (not every child is the product of a marriage between a network engineer and a computer engineer). And is a far less irritating girly toy that the excorable grammatically incorrect ‘I Can Be’ Barbie line.
There is similar complaint about the proliferation of science kits aimed at girls; packed in pink, ‘girly’ boxes for making things like soap, bath bombs and the like. True the ‘pampering’ aspect could be skating a bit too close to the wind, but they do appear to be more practical endeavours than similar boy’s sets which seem to be based around ‘Gross Science’ and making Goo/Slime.
* I wanted to avoid starting off a diatribe with the phrase, ‘Speaking as Mother’ or ‘Speaking as the Mother of a Duaghter’. But I am indeed a Mother, of a daughter, and not only that one with a degree, in computer engineering. So it is inevitable, I suppose, that she is being exposed to Rockets, space, dinosaurs, Dr Who and Lego from an early age. But is worth noting that while I work as a freelance developer, I never wrote code before university and I whiled away many happy hours, even into my teens making historical costumes for my Barbie dolls.
And as for Amelia herself? At not yet four she likes building random things with Lego, like “planes” and playing with her dolls, a sassy bunch of dames by all accounts based on their monster hunting exploits; she has a happy balance between sort of girly and macabre that I wouldn’t change or try to influence by denying access to anything thing girly (apart from Barbie, the line for my sanity has to be drawn somewhere, she has other fashion dolls, such as Japan’s Jenny and a Mulan)
