Indulge Your Good Taste Take a break to relax and enjoy an appetizing array of dining options at Northbrook Court. Your Ultimate Shopping App-sistant See what's new at your favorite stores and restaurants, navigate the mall with ease, and park like a pro with recommendations and reminders – all on our free app! Take advantage of members-only notifications and be the first to know about new store openings, the latest trends, and the hottest events. One card, countless reasons for giving. Our GGP Gift Card can be redeemed at any of our stores and locations, making it a perfect gift for loved ones, or yourself.Welcome to the Kiddiwinks Online LEGO shop We hope you enjoy searching through our website that’s filled with a wide range of LEGO products for all ages and interests. In fact, we’re one of the largest suppliers of LEGO in South Africa and strive to offer our carefully selected products at competitive prices. If you don’t find what
you’re looking for here, feel free to give any of our stores a call – you’ll find their contact details below. Check out our News page where you'll find a range of useful tips and stories all to do with LEGO. Turn your LEGO dreams into reality with Kiddiwinks. Shop 7Palmyra Junction9 Palmyra RoadClaremont Tel: 021 671 4525 Shop G122Blue Route Mall16 Tokai RoadTokai Tel: 021 712 5202 Shop G18Willowbridge Lifestyle Centre39 Carl Cronje DriveTyger Valley Tel: 021 914 0151Home > THEMES > Friends Is your child more interested in dolls and role playing than building action and adventure toys? LEGO Friends sets offer creative fun that enhances critical reasoning skills in a way that’s accessible to your child and in line with their interests. Friends LEGO sets feature five best friends living in Heartlake City: Olivia, Stephanie, Emma, Mia, and Andrea. Olivia, the protagonist, enjoys science, nature, history, inventing, hiking, photography, and drawing.
She also takes care of a newborn foal. Each character in LEGO Friends of Heartlake City has a distinct personality and interests, embodying a diverse and dynamic set of pastimes and fascinations. We have the whole line of LEGO Friends for sale. Let your child join Olivia and her friends for adventures and fun in a beautiful city with cute animals to take care of and rescue, music rehearsals to go to, daytime boat cruises to enjoy. Let your child make a LEGO friend. Buy LEGO Friends toys online from Brick Marketplace and sharpen your child’s reasoning skills during play!To many parents, the ubiquity of separate color-coded shopping aisles feels natural, reflecting a belief in innate gender differences and discrete interests. Recently, however, campaigns such as Let Toys Be Toys and No Gender December have made international headlines for championing desegregated toy aisles, recommending reorganization by theme or interest instead. Rather than believing dolls and crafts are for girls while trucks and science kits are for boys, “we think all toys are for all children,” explains Let Toys Be Toys campaigner Jo Jowers, who lives in England.President Obama waded into the matter in December, when at a Toys for Tots event he suggested a T-ball set was an ideal gift for girls.
“I’m just trying to break down these gender stereotypes,” he said at the time. “Children use toys to try on new roles, experiment, and explore interests,” explains Susan Linn, executive director of the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. “Rigidly gendered toy marketing tells kids who they should be, how they should behave, and what they should be interested in” — an unhealthily prescriptive situation.Recent research demonstrates today’s toys are divided by gender at historically unprecedented levels. “There are now far fewer non-gendered items available for children than in any prior era,” says Elizabeth Sweet, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California at Davis — even fewer than 50 years ago, when gender discrimination was socially acceptable. Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here How can this be? The answer lies in significant media industry changes during the 1980s, when the Federal Communications Commission’s television deregulation removed longstanding limitations on children’s advertising and widespread consumer adoption of cable allowed media owners to target more narrowly segmented audiences than ever before.
As a result, marketers suddenly viewed children as a segmentable, highly lucrative demographic after largely ignoring them for 50 years. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that two of today’s most successful companies — Disney, whose Princess brand is the No. 2 licensed property in the United States and Canada, and LEGO, which recently surpassed Mattel as the world’s largest toy maker — were early adopters of the trend to meticulously segment the child market by gender in the late 1980s. The licensing success of Disney’s The Little Mermaid in 1989 prompted several additional princess film releases in quick succession, positioning Disney as a formidable power in the girl market. Likewise, in 1988, LEGO debuted its “Zack the LEGO Maniac” campaign, squarely positioning itself as a boy brand. A year later, LEGO began tailoring its minifigs’ historically gender-neutral faces to include lipstick and facial hair — clear gender markers. The ripple effects of these monumental 1980s-era marketing changes are evident today.
Now, once classically gender-neutral toys are produced in “boy” and “girl” versions: Radio Flyer wagons, Tinkertoys, Mega Bloks, Fisher-Price stacking rings, and everything in between come in “pinkwashed’’ varieties, in hopes that families with children of each sex will buy twice the toys. Meanwhile, Disney Princess’s record-breaking profits prompted a proliferation of princess items from competitors, and Disney bought Marvel and Lucasfilm, the Star Wars creator, to compete for the boy market. Similarly, LEGO competes for girls’ purchasing power not through inclusivity but by offering separate, stereotypically girlish themes, like Disney Princess and LEGO Friends. What does this mean for today’s families? Lori Day, an educational consultant and psychologist in Newburyport and author of Her Next Chapter: How Mother-Daughter Book Clubs Can Help Girls Navigate Malicious Media, Risky Relationships, Girl Gossip, and So Much More, argues that children’s play has been altered, with long-term consequences.
“Boys and girls stop playing together at a much younger age than was developmentally typical until this recent gender segmentation,” she says. “The resulting rigidly stereotyped gender roles are unhealthy for both males and females, who are actually more alike than different.” Sweet concurs: “This kind of marketing has normalized the idea that boys and girls are fundamentally and markedly different from one another, and this very idea lies at the core of many of our social processes of inequality.” Parents can push back against these problems, however, by raising critically aware children. Jennifer Shewmaker, a psychology professor at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, and author of Sexualized Media Messages and Our Children: Teaching Kids to Be Smart Critics and Consumers, suggests: “When you see stereotyped advertisements, ask the child, ‘What do you think about the way that depicts girls and boys? Is that how the boys and girls in your life act?’ ” Carolyn Danckaert, cofounder of Washington, D.C.-based empowerment resource site A Mighty Girl, adds, “When parents explain that some people think only girls or only boys are good at something but their family disagrees, children can recognize stereotypes for what they are.”
Not all parents share such concerns, of course. Jo Paoletti, an American studies professor at the University of Maryland in College Park and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys From the Girls in America, attributes differing opinions to ongoing culture wars. “Adults who subscribe to more traditional, conservative gender roles see children’s preferences for stereotypical clothing and toys as natural expressions of innate differences,” Paoletti says. As such, Erin McNeill, founder and president of Watertown-based Media Literacy Now, advocates for integrating media literacy into the K-12 curriculum. “Some parents won’t notice or be concerned about the gendering of products. It’s important that all children have the opportunity to gain the critical thinking skills to understand how and why gendered ads target them,” she says. - Finding a summer camp that fits your child’s needs - 7 things every kid should master - Parents, you’ve been doing pep talks all wrong