The idea that legos aren’t for today’s girls is complete bull. My best friend has a 7 year old girl and her favorite Christmas gift was a Lego Harry Potter castle. Whenever she comes over she goes straight for our older son’s Legos. I know of plenty of other girls who are the same way.

This is such a great blog! A coalition of orgs under the umbrella of PBG and SPARK are pushing LEGO to advertise their traditional building sets to girls again–right now it’s all the pinkified Ladyfig Friends in the girl aisles. Please support if you can: http://www.change.org/petitions/tell-lego-to-stop-selling-out-girls-liberatelegos

I agree that LEGO hasn’t done a good job appealing to girls over the last decade, but I don’t think Lego Friends are anywhere near as bad as people are claiming. My nearly-4 daughter received a set as a gift from my sister, and she plays with it along with her regular Lego. She prefers the look of the mini-doll to the minifigure, but that’s not the real appeal. It’s the cool accessories and tools – now her regular minifigures are sporting wrenches, oil cans, and cutlery along with all their other bits and bobs.

The sets themselves are “real” Lego – that is, they don’t include large prefab wall sections and other “simplified” pieces like Fabuland or Belville did. They are well-designed sets, too. The Friends house kit is an awesome house set, with lots of cool parts and ideas. With a non-pink roof and standard minifigures, it would be one of the best Lego sets I’ve ever seen. And the subjects aren’t as bad as people claim, either. Sure,, there’s a girl with a hot tub, but there’s a workshop, a car, an excellent vet clinic, and the sets coming out this summer include an airplane and a camper van. As a feminist, I don’t think that all the hoopla is justified.

While I will continue to buy regular Lego for my daughter, I will happily buy her Friends sets if she wants them. At worst, they’re still light years ahead of Barbie et al.

I think Lego just wants us to spend more money. You have a boy and a girl? Buy two sets instead of one. More money in their pockets.

“Disney Princess for her girls and everything Toy Story for her boys” — I’m pretty sure we’re on the same side here …

All I’m saying is: why does there have to be a boy lego (toy story) and a girl lego (princessess). They’re freaking building blocks. Heather nailed it.

I think you have misjudged the new Legos. Granted, they are targeted at girls, but not every type of girl, they are targeted at girls that play with dolls, barbies, etc… Girls that don’t play with Legos already. These are a new gateway ‘drug’ to Legos as a whole. Sure they may build a title playset this time, but once the parts are dismantled and the imagination kicks in they may build a spaceship or a castle, or any number of things, because when you get right down to it they are still Legos, that work with every other Lego ever made and if there is a toy that gets girls who wouldn’t have picked up a lego brick ever.. building with them, then so be it!

This was a wonderful post! I talk a lot with my husband about how the “smart” toys just aren’t geared towards girls- you know, toys that encourage engineering (legos), science, math, those type of things.

http://practicingparenting.blogspot.com/

I agree with Frankie. The 50’s ad was geared to parents. I am not that old, but I would guess that a parent of the 50’s with 2 kids would still buy 2 sets (1 for each kid)…so the argument that Lego is just trying to sell more Legos with the Friend line is not quite right. Of course they want to sell more…but by pitting girls against boys….I don’t think so. I think it is naive to think that if Lego (or any company) could sell the same thing to boys and girls, they wouldn’t do so. Of course they would. it would save on production costs…if you know Lego, you know that they had a huge problem with too many “specialty” parts in production which raised costs and lower profits. They almost went bankrupt. Having different lines for boys and girls can’t be efficient.

I’ll say the following even though on a blog like this, the opinions don’t usually favor what I am going to say…but girls and boys are different. They think differently, they grow differently, and they play differently. Trying to make girls into boys (and boys into girls) and equating equality for girls as “doing everything boys do” is unconscionable. Boys tend to like hands on building stuff (and uni-tasking)…girls tend to develop/create relationships (and also develop multi-tasking). With that said, I did mean to say “tend to”. We as parents certainly should let kids explore all kinds of play….but just like we shouldn’t force all boys to play with Hot Wheels, we should also not force boys to play house or girls to play “traditional” Legos when they don’t want to do so.

So, lighten up. Let Lego do what it thinks is best (remember that they do sales globally and not all countries are as “gender aware as we”). If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.