Since my oldest was 2.5 years old he has been putting together Lego sets geared towards much older kids. His obsession began simply with a few Lego City Fire Truck sets. We would spend hours putting them together and playing with them and hopefully not breaking them. He's 10 now and while he doesn't play with Legos as much as he used to, he still enjoys them... we all do.
I had never really given much thought to how Legos are marketed. As far as I was concerned they were just the perfect toy to play with, with my kids. It never concerned me that Legos seemed to be very much a boy toy and not something that was marketed to girls. I have two boys, so seeing things from a parent with a girl's perspective was just not something on my radar.
Then the Friends line came out and everyone seemed to be in an uproar. Why was this new pink and purple packaging marketed directly to girls showing characters running a beauty salon or a frozen yogurt joint? It still didn't dawn on me why people were upset. A lot of people questioned why there were different Lego sets for seemingly different genders. Why couldn't the normal (let's face it, the Friends line looks weird) sets appeal to boys AND girls?
Sure there are female characters in a lot of sets like Hermione, Wonder Woman, Batgirl, and Poison Ivy, but there aren't any sets where there are female police officers or female astronauts... but there can be pretty easily. Here is what I propose for my favorite toy. Instead of just having one head and one hair piece, why don't they offer two? Include a male face and hair and a female face and hair. They don't even need to make two heads just have one side painted like a girl and one side painted like a boy, that way the child can choose the gender of their mini figure. I have plenty of head pieces that have two faces on them depicting different moods, why not two different sexes? Then the only thing that you would need to add is ONE hair piece for every mini figure. I know that Lego has started to add more female minifigures to their sets, but with my proposal they don't need to. They can have both male AND female pretty easily and the kids can decide who they want to play with.
This article originally appeared on Daddy's in Charge.
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