Parents are totally to blame. Author – if your 4 year old daughter has been “socialized” into princess culture, you have only yourself to blame for that.

Great article! We have a little girl on her way (any minute now) and have been trying very hard to buy non-gendered clothing for her. Even infant clothes seem to come in either blue or pink, with trains, trucks and dinosaurs for the boys, and flowers, fairies and hearts for the girls. I agree, kids are socialized from birth and as much as they can, parents have to try and provide a balanced, non-gendered approach when dressing kids, buying toys, especially deciding what movies to expose them to (TV too – but we don’t watch TV, so luckily that influence won’t be a huge concern at least until she’s old enough to spend time at others’ houses).

I have a boy and a girl. I bought a blue bin, a pink bin, and a green/orange/white expansion set…mixed them all together, distributed them roughly evenly between the two bins, and gave one bin to each. I did give the pink bin to the girl and the blue bin to the boy, but the boy really likes the purple and pink pieces.

Gendered TV shows are worse. Dora the Explorer is aimed at younger kids than Diego. So its not surprising that boys like Dora when they are a certain age and girls like Diego at a different age. And yet most Dora toys are pink. Kai Lan is even worse, I swear there isn’t a Kai Lan shirt out there that isn’t pink and with ruffles.

Also my sons both love pink, they want the pink winter boots with the flowers. They want the jewelry. They want to wear purses and dresses (which is really weird because mommy doesn’t wear purses or dresses really at all anymore). I wish I could let them wear dresses out in public, and whatnot. I do let them wear purses and jewelry out in public and we would have bought the pink boots but the ones my 2 year old really wanted weren’t insulated enough.

And my family knows how much my kids love dolls, and nearly all the toys my kids get are presents because we don’t have a lot of extra money. But no one will buy them dolls as presents. I mentioned it to my grandmother, and even though even when her kids were little she and her friends never cared if the girls played with “boy toys” and the boys played with “dolls” she says “I don’t know, you just don’t buy dolls for boys” SIGH.

They did get the girly kai lan lego for Christmas (from mommy and daddy). And mommy and daddy will keep buying dolls and jewelry (even though the toxins scare me).

But somewhere, along the way, my almost 4 year old has decided that “boys like cool things and girls like pretty things” and that makes me sad. Part of the reason he’s not in daycare is the moral lessons that get passed around there (about gender, and germs, etc). He’s 4, he should just be a kid. Is that too much to ask?

Companies exist to make money. Society has allowed companies to exploit children. We, as parents, have the responsibility to protect our children from the widespread exploitation that is the norm today, from TV shows to advertisements to toys. We don’t have cable. Our kids have never seen a commercial. This makes a huge difference. Do they watch TV? Yes, but it’s what we pick, and they’re not marketed to in the middle of it. As for toys, little kids (boys AND girls!) seem to love to dress up in frilly, fun things, and that’s fine by me. Our daughter is 3 and she loves the princess dress up things at pre-school. At our house, though, we don’t have much in the way of Disney princess paraphenalia; we do have dress up items and they seem to be adequate. I strive to find gender-neutral toys, and they are definitely out there – you just have to look. It helps immensely that she has no idea most of that stuff exists, though, because her exposure to advertisements is almost nil. Melissa and Doug make great stuff, from playsets to puzzles; the little people sets are largely gender-neutral; we have balls and doctors kits and toolsets and all that stuff, and none of it is “for girls.” That just doesn’t make much sense to me, especially since her younger sib is a boy. We DO have the power, as parents, to steer our daughters from the princess-obsessed marketing orgy that exists today, and I think we have an absolute responsibility to do so. I was a “girly” kind of girl and still enjoy make-up and dresses and sparkly things, and my daughter looks to be the same way, but she also loves to be a cowgirl, look at bugs, and play with her toolsets, and it’s all good.