Lego Friends debuted on January 1, 2012 and is backed by a $40 million global marketing campaign. The first female minifig — those 4-centimeter people with the yellow jugheads — to appear in the January 2012 LEGO catalog is a doctor ably holding up the back end of a stretcher with her male colleague in a new ambulance set. But she doesn’t show up until page 12, after dozens upon dozens of male ninjas, firefighters and all manner of villains. This is the paradox of LEGO for parents, especially parents of girls: the famous Danish toy maker could provide an oasis from the anachronistic gender stereotypes so rampant these days — especially in its City line, where women might be employed in all sorts of capacities, as they are in real life — and yet the fantasy lines such as Ninjago, Kingdoms, Hero Factory, and of course, Star Wars, are relentlessly male, with the exception of Princess Leia. According to a recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek, focusing on boys was a specific business decision to get the LEGO Group out of a major financial crisis back in 2004 when they were losing $1 million a day.
The strategy worked so well that revenues increased by 105% from 2006 to 2010, and sales in the U.S. topped $1 billion for the first time last year. I have spent thousands of dollars on LEGO for my son, hosted three LEGO birthday parties and have even installed shelves to display his creations. I have indulged his passion (as has his father and generous grandparents and godparents) because it supposedly develops his math and spatial skills, or at least keeps him busy for hours at a stretch. But I have also been more than a little disheartened to see his younger sister initially drawn to our buckets of expensive plastic only to lose interest. I can’t say I blame her. I suspect that girls don’t like to play with today’s LEGOs because they so rarely see themselves represented in the minifigs, and because the events being reenacted — battles to the death, alien attacks — are unappealingly violent. (That and the fact that LEGO is routinely shelved in the “boy” section of the toy department in stores.)
So when I first heard about the 2012 debut of a new theme that was more girl-friendly, I was hopeful. (MORE: Why E-Reading With Your Kid Can Impede Learning) And then I had a look at the stuff. LEGO Friends, as the new line is called, creates a place called Heartlake City which thus far consists of a beauty parlor, a café, a bakery, a clothing design school, a vet’s office, a sound stage, and, thankfully, an inventor’s workshop. (So much for municipal services.) There are no men in Heartlake City, except for the father of Olivia, one of the five core “friends” who are not minifigs at all but redesigned mini-dolls that come with the following accessories: a purse, a hair brush, a hair drier, four lipsticks and two barrettes; a spatula, an electric mixer and two cupcakes; and for when they’re not primping or baking, a puppy dog and a pink book with butterflies on it. Is this message — with its emphasis on physical appearance and limited career choices — really any different from that of Disney’s princesses?
What’s worse, LEGO Friends doesn’t give girls the same sense of mastery and accomplishment that it gives boys. Usually, when you open a LEGO set you will find several smaller bags numerically labeled in the order in which to build, along with a booklet of diagrams of the steps. But LEGO Friends has dispensed with this system, so that girls can begin playing without completing the whole model first. So much for learning how to follow instructions, or finishing what you started, or just getting those damn pieces off the floor so I won’t step on them. (MORE: Konigsberg: The Competitive Sport of the Holiday Photo Card) Kids learn through their toys, and as Peggy Orenstein, the author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From The Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, pointed out in a recent article in the New York Times, even while boys and girls show some sex differences in what they chose to play with, they’re also incredibly malleable: At issue, then, is not nature or nurture but how nurture becomes nature: the environment in which children play and grow can encourage a range of aptitudes or foreclose them.
So blithely indulging — let alone exploiting — stereotypically gendered play patterns may have a more negative long-term impact on kids’ potential than parents imagine. And promoting, without forcing, cross-sex friendships as well as a breadth of play styles may be more beneficial. There is even evidence that children who have opposite-sex friendships during their early years have healthier romantic relationships as teenagers. Traditionally, toys were intended to communicate parental values and expectations, to train children for their future adult roles. Today’s boys and girls will eventually be one another’s professional peers, employers, employees, romantic partners, co-parents. How can they develop skills for such collaborations from toys that increasingly emphasize, reinforce, or even create, gender differences? My daughter’s fourth birthday is coming up, and I’m sure one of the Friends sets will be among her presents. I’ll probably even swallow my misgivings and buy her one myself in the hopes that it will get her building alongside her brother.
(For those who are offended by LEGO Friends, you can sign a petition here.) In 1963, the son of the founder of LEGO, Godtfred Christiansen, defined “10 characteristics of Lego” and one of them was: “For girls and for boys.” I assume, from the wording, that he did not mean one set for girls, one set for boys, a separate-but-equal doctrine. I just wish that they had tried a bit harder to carry out his gender-neutral vision.In 2012, after four years of research, Lego launched their Friends line. The line was marketed to girls five and older and featured kits that encouraged not only construction but storyline based play. The line was very controversial and there were numerous petitions asking Lego to stop pandering to gender stereotypes. Protesters felt that Lego was going back on its years of gender neutral claims by making girls feel like the only toys that they could play with should be pink and involve pampering. Never missing the opportunity to rant over gender stereotypes in toys, I was one of those protesters.
The petitions were all over my Facebook feed. They showed beauty shops adorned with pink bricks, and said that the line simplified construction for the girls. Well, if I read it on Facebook it had to be true, so I eagerly signed and shared every petition. If my daughter was to become interested in building, I was certain that she would be perfectly content building a firetruck or a dragon castle. The Friends line had me in a tizzy. Well, as we all know glass houses shatter easily and within good time mine was going to shatter into hundreds of pastel Lego bricks. When the Lego Friends line was launched, our family was knee deep in a love affair with all things Lego. Our son had always loved playing with Duplo blocks as a toddler and has since spent countless hours building with Lego bricks. We even used his Lego play as his first introduction to math. There were no preschool or kindergarten math worksheets or workbooks. Kids that spend time involved in complex block and Lego play in their preschool and kindergarten years develop high levels of spatial perception and have a much easier transition to advanced math topics in their teen years.
Spatial skills are the ability to visualize and manipulate two and three dimensional objects, and are essential for reading a map and merging into traffic. They are also the foundation for success in fields such as math, engineering, science, architecture, and even meteorology. I had seen how our son benefited from Lego play and I wanted our daughter to gain the same skill set through play. There was only one issue, she did not have any interest in Lego bricks. As a toddler, her favorite Duplo activity was to suck on them, and as she continued to grow, her use for Lego bricks didn’t progress much past eating or throwing them. She seemed downright bored by all things Lego. After a while, the thought crept in my head that maybe girls really don’t like building. Could all of my Facebook rants about gender stereotypes in toys be wrong? The thought of deleting all those posts was overwhelming, so I settled on assuming our daughter just had different interests from her brother.
Not because she is a different gender, but because she is a different person. While I accepted that my daughter didn’t seem interested, I must admit that I hoped that one day she would enjoy building with Lego bricks. I wanted to see the excitement on her face after she created a structure that first appeared in her mind. Kids that sit down and build learn how to turn an idea in their head into a tangible object. They figure out how things around them work and gain the confidence in executing and completing difficult projects. I wanted her to have the confidence that she could engineer, build, and execute a project just as well as her brother or any other boy. Apparently our daughter wasn’t the only preschool girl overlooking Lego play as the go-to entertainment. In 2011, 91% of Lego products were sold for use by boys. Were girls building at all? Were they missing out on the opportunity to learn all that such play offers? It’s no secret that in our country males are cited as having better spatial skills than women, and gender differences in spatial and pattern recognition skills appear as early as four years old (1).
It is becoming clear that nurture, and not nature, has a lot to do with these differences. Girls with older brothers are much more likely to be exposed to, and have interest in, building toys such as blocks and Lego bricks. These girls also have higher spatial and math skills than other girls. While this gender gap begins early on and extends through adolescence and adulthood, it can be reversed. Israeli researches demonstrated that the gender gap in spatial skills among first graders could be closed by getting the girls to engage in activities, such as building, just once a week. All this research is fascinating, but how could we get girls interested in building? Companies are trying to figure this out and new start up companies such as Goldiblox are developing toys whose main goal is to get girls to build and engineer. We bought Goldiblox a few months back, and while our kids enjoyed playing with it, it didn’t seem to spark an interest to build in our daughter. Unbeknownst to me, that missing spark was about to burst into a flame.
Two weeks ago our daughter yelled that she needed help. I went upstairs and found her on the floor building her brother’s Lego Dino HQ Defense kit. She had the directions out and needed help finding a piece. I tried to contain my excitement as I sat down with her. We sorted, we counted, we added, and we discussed details of the directions. She was incredibly capable, confident, and animated in her building. I was so happy that she was enjoying building and I was shaking my head and saying a rhetorical “I told you so” to Lego. The next day she asked for her own Lego bricks. We told her that there were already approximately 5,000 bricks for us to step on each day and that we certainly didn’t need anymore. She said that wanted her own kit to build. She was so excited that we relented despite knowing that our feet would never forgive us. I sat her on my lap and went to the official Lego website. She dismissed every Lego City kit that I pointed to. She had her eyes set on a kit that I was pretending not to see.
I showed her at least ten different sets and her response was always the same. She told me that she “would” build those but she really wanted to build and play with the other kit. She wanted Olivia’s Tree House, the number one selling kit from the Friends line. Rolling my eyes and sighing loudly I clicked on the kit. Then I heard myself saying, “This set is really cool.” Yes, the Friends line has a beauty shop. However, it also has a vet clinic, a horse farm, and kits that include cars and airplanes. I could fight and resist, but the reality was the our daughter did not want to build a police car. She wanted to build a tree house and a beach buggy with purple seats. I swallowed my pride and added two Friends kits to our cart. The next few days were long. All our daughter thought about was the arrival of her kits. When the FedEx truck arrived she literally jumped up and down holding her purple Lego boxes. Her brother was jumping with her and they ran to their room and began to build.
She loved every aspect of the kits and they built one construction after another. I watched and quietly swallowed my pride. These kits made my daughter incredibly happy and for that I am grateful. It has been nonstop building here ever since. Our daughter wakes each day and is excited to build. There is a lot of complex storyline-based play with the kits, and a new kit has been added to the mix. Her mini-figs have found their way out of the horse shows and into dragon castles. However, they always go home. She prides herself in setting up her “Lego Village” each night based on whatever storyline she created during the day. She is enamored by the animals in each set and has even used random bricks to build them a mini-barn. She is happy and incredibly proud. In the end, despite the protests of myself and others, Lego Friends has become one of the biggest selling lines in Lego history and Lego sales to girls has tripled since 2011. Apparently, either parents feel more comfortable buying their daughters the Friends line, or girls want to build with the Friends line.