The Problem With Toy Guns And Princesses

Life Kit: Parenting

NPR

Kids & Family

4.6 • 640 Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Whether it's mini-makeup kits, gross-smelling slime or semi-automatic foam-dart guns, every parent or caregiver has fielded requests for toys that they're just not that into. We talk about princesses and superheroes and their influence on kids with Rosemarie Truglio of Sesame Workshop and Lisa Dinella, a gender studies professor at Monmouth University.

Here's what to remember:
- Banning toys outright can be counterproductive.
- Pay more attention to how kids play than what they're playing with.
- Fight sexism in the playroom by broadening toy selections.
- Talk directly to your kids about your values.
- Join in your child's play to help expand the possibilities.
- Grossed out? Use toilet toys as a chance to teach science — and manners.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You step on them in the hallway, you shove them back in the closet, they keep coming back to take over your living room.
0:06.4	What are we talking about today, Corey?
0:07.7	Oh, we are so talking about toys.
0:10.1	Toys.
0:11.5	And to learn more about them, we went to the heart of it all, the annual toy fair New York.
0:18.7	That is the Barkey Gallery.
0:24.6	It is a mermaid that comes package of slime. Two different colors of slime. There's a little button on her back
0:27.6	where the girls can put the slime inside and it's squishy so you can feel that it's in there and you can take it out and change the color.
0:33.6	That is...
0:36.6	Sorry, that's unsettling.
0:38.5	This is the one second soaker.
0:40.0	This is the first real innovation in squirt guns in about 20 years.
0:44.5	Legos.
0:45.5	I'm Andrea Kamenetz, an NPR education reporter and the mother of two girls.
0:48.8	And I'm Corey Turner, an NPR education reporter and the father of two boys.
0:52.9	And we're coming to you today from Toy Fair, New York.
0:56.2	The largest trade show of its kind in the hemisphere.
0:59.6	And this is Life Kit for Parents with Sesame Workshop.
1:03.0	We're here to help you through the tough conversations with kids.
1:06.6	Things like death, divorce, and the question for today, we're calling it the toy problem.
1:13.0	What to do when your kids start asking you
1:14.7	for stuff that makes you feel kind of uncomfortable as a parent?
	...

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