Genderless toys to preserve your mental health

The learning of gender roles through the bias imposed on their games and toys can end up affecting the mental, physical and emotional health of our children. Let your daughter or son choose their clothes and toys with complete freedom and according to their tastes and preferences, not according to the roles imposed by the patriarchal culture.

In order to grow up knowing themselves, with high self-esteem and valuing themselves as a co-responsible human being, with equal rights, duties, opportunities and importance, our creatures need to play, explore, invent, create, manipulate and get emotionally involved with all kinds of toys: both dolls and balls. Both buildings and kitchens, symbolic games based on learning communication, language, emotions and care, as well as scientific, creative, action, construction and movement games.

If we give girls only one type of toys, such as dolls or princesses, in addition to curtailing their physical autonomy, we are leaving them the subliminal message that the role of both girls and women is to care, serve, show off. and submit to the demands of others. On the other hand, if we buy children only constructions, action games, ships, cars, experiments, in addition to promoting logical-mathematical learning, implicitly the message that they are moved, active, intelligent, that they serve to create, fight, subdue those who serve them (ergo girls and women).

POSITIVE REFERENTS AND WITHOUT STEREOTYPES

The current patriarchal culture educates our daughters and sons under a bias that makes them think, from their childhood, as unequal. We can break out of this damaging paradigm by raising them in fairness. Part of the change is to rid the toys of gender interpretation.

All toys fulfill one (or more) educational functions. Dolls, for example, symbolically represent the social function of caring, empathizing, sheltering, clinging. While building and assembly games pose mathematical and physical challenges of logic.

• Free of clichés. To build their femininity or masculinity as they really feel it, without impositions or bias, toys must be free from sexist stereotypes: outside of hypersexualized dolls and hyper-muscular guerrilla dolls. That their adult models of reference for their symbolic games are not unreal people built on the basis of patriarchal canons that objectify women and exalt the macho and violent man.
• Not pink, not blue. For some years we have witnessed an aggressive escalation in gender marketing aimed at children. Girls have to wear pink and their toys too, even the world”s balls! They have to be this color, while boys are reserved blue. Break away from this imposition! Let your daughter or son choose their clothes and toys with complete freedom and based on their tastes and preferences, not on the sexist guidelines that stores, brands and society”s norms set for us.
• Constructions and kitchens. Boys and girls need, to find and develop their gifts, talents and qualities, experiment with all kinds of respectful toys. Learning to take care of your body, cook, repair, build, express emotions, etc., is the task of all people.
• Referents. For millennia, patriarchy has hidden women”s work outside the home. However, there have been many who, opposing a society that discriminated against them, managed to overcome obstacles and become scientists, painters, builders, musicians, doctors, philosophers, writers, etc. Tell your little ones about these pioneers, give away books about their achievements and talents, offer them positive references, both female and male. Share and give them a broad vision of the possibilities they have beyond gender.

WHY NON-SEXIST TOYS HELP YOUR MENTAL HEALTH

Seven-year-old Juan played happily pushing his Darth Vader home in the baby carriage that his cousin Ana had lent him. She felt good and enjoyed caring for her doll with tenderness and empathy. However, as soon as his father saw him pushing the cart down the street, he began to mock the boy a bit cruelly and to ugly his behavior, telling him that this toy was for girls. Although he liked it very much, Juan never again played with his cousin”s stroller.

Juan, who was born without prejudice, wanted and needed to play with all kinds of toys to develop fully, but society prevented him from doing so. The little one, being a boy, could only play with “child”s toys”, as implicit patriarchal norms dictate. We are facing the hidden curriculum of patriarchal society, the learning of gender roles through the bias imposed on their games and toys. An underhanded training, extremely harmful, that induces to raise and educate boys and girls in inequality, injustice and submission to these precepts.

Our work, both from a maternity and a co-responsible and conscious paternity, is basic if we intend not to burden (or have others burden) our creatures with all these heavy chains of submission and repression. Chains that subdue, not only through words, culture, customs, and customs, but also act at an unconscious level through the loss of emotional health (and the weakness and inaction that derive from it) .

Low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, somatic diseases, phobias, etc. start from a violent and unequal patriarchal upbringing and education that is based on the disconnection of people from their desires and needs through repression (fear, pain, terror) and control (punishments, rewards, manipulations, hierarchy). By freeing them from the oppressive patriarchal culture, in addition to offering them independence and autonomy, we are providing our daughters and sons with mental, physical and emotional health. We will achieve this if they grow up knowing who they are, who they are, what they need and how to communicate with others in an assertive and empathetic way. These learnings, in part, will come through the words and actions, both conscious and unconscious, of the adults around them, but also through their games and toys.