children

Girl w/ Pen is excited to present this guest post from Laurel Wider, a psychotherapist with a speciality in gender, relationships and identity.  She’s also a mom and Founder of Wonder Crew, a new line of toys that brings connection and kindness into boys’ play.   

Play is how children learn, which means toys have the power to create change. As I began to pay more attention to toys marketed to boys, it occurred to me that so many of them emphasized muscles and aggression and NONE offered a play experience that encouraged connection or even friendship.  Thrilled by the surge of toys that encourage  STEM and positive body images for girls, I want to help expand the way boys see themselves and the world around them.

I’m a mom, psychotherapist and now founder of Wonder Crew, a line of dolls that bring connection and feelings into boys’ play.  In my therapy practice, I’ve worked with several boys and men who have painfully grappled with impossible stereotypes of masculinity. Boys are raised to prioritize toughness and self-reliance – in my work with clients I’ve seen this lead to isolation, depression and sometimes aggression.

And then about a year ago, my son came home from preschool with the idea that “boys aren’t supposed to cry.”  I was floored that my own son had gotten a hold of this message. These stereotypes impact and harm everyone.  This is how I ended up a toy inventor.

Change is generally something that happens gradually. With this in mind, I thought long and hard about how to create a “hybrid” toy, one that still resembled familiar play scenarios for boys, but also offered the opportunity to connect and nurture.  So I came up with action figure meets favorite stuffed animal.  This morphed into Wonder Crew:  a line of Crewmates (aka dolls) that come with a matching piece of adventure gear (dress-up) plus mini open-ended comic book.  The formula:  Child + Crewmate = Wonder Crew.

Right now we have one Crewmate, his name is Will and he comes in three adventures with a fourth in the pipeline:  Superhero, Rockstar, Builder and Chef.  These adventures were based on interviews with over 150 parents, educators and kids that spoke to me about play that they’ve observed/ kids’ favorite play scenarios.

At first I thought that these adventures were too stereotypical, but I’ve come to realize that it’s important to show that nurturing fits in with all kinds of play, even the kind that’s stereotypically masculine.  And really the big picture idea is that anyone can be a connected, empathetic, nurturing person.

Wonder Crew is all about friendship and adventure and clearly this is not just a boy thing!  I plan to incorporate a girl Crewmate, while keeping with the same adventures. This would have been my preferred doll growing up.

While inspired by boys, Wonder Crew will be an interest-based brand, not gender based.  And the plan is for Crewmates to represent all kids (race, gender, ability).

Wonder Crew’s Kickstarter launched last week. We’re already over 40% funded, but we’ve got a ways to go. Please check it out and help spread the word!  It’s our goal to not only fund first production, but also to show public interest.  A large toy company told me that dolls for boys will never work; help Wonder Crew enlighten them!

If you care about smart toys or if you don’t live under a media rock, then by now you’ve heard about GoldieBlox, the girls engineering toy. Maybe you read about it here at Girl w/Pen. Maybe you saw the viral video about the toy that parodied the Beastie Boys song, “Girls.” In the video, three girls set off a Rube Goldberg machine and aim to take over the world. The only problem was that the Beastie Boys said thank you by suing GoldieBlox. Then the toy got critiqued left and right—too pink, too princessy, too wrong for “stealing” a Beastie Boys song. Well now, no matter how you felt about the toy, you likely saw their new ad while inhaling nachos during the Super Bowl. GoldieBlox won Intuit’s small business Super Bowl commercial competition which means they essentially won 4 million dollars, the amount equivalent to make and then screen a commercial during the Super Bowl.

And that means that GoldieBlox really just became a household name.

This commercial puts GoldieBlox, a small start-up toy company that wants to, as they say, “disrupt the pink aisle,” at your local toy store, back on top. And to make matters even better, days ago GoldieBlox’s “Spinning Machine” won the People’s Choice and Educational Toy award of the year at the 14^th annual Toy Industry Association (TIA) Awards. Debbie Sterling, GoldieBlox CEO, invented one of the first engineering toys for girls. She shares her challenges in her TEDX talk: her path as a female minority in a Stanford engineering program, a woman inventor in the big business androcentric toy industry, and as a female entrepreneur in booming Silicon Valley. Sterling’s vision as an entrepreneur, and the ideological work of the toy, are the reasons we wanted her to help us open a new gender center, the Cassandra Voss Center, on our campus. So this Fall, we became the “Midwest launch” of GoldieBlox.

What did that mean? Debbie Sterling and VP, Lindsey Shepard, spoke on our campus and taught us how to engage hundreds of kids with GoldieBlox when we created a toy zone in our Center. St. Norbert College was also among the first colleges to include the toy in their curriculum. As Assistant Professor of Education, Chris Meidl, said when he introduced the toy in his class on “Play,” “No matter any other criticisms about the toy itself, the clear message delivered is that girls can build too. And that is a message worth being heard, for girls and boys, for women and most importantly for men.”

So I’m loyal-it’s true. I know the founders personally and heard them speak passionately about their dream of the toy and for girls globally. The toy, though, has come under a lot of critique. When Slate’s holiday gift guide tagline read “Forget GoldieBlox. Buy a Birdfeeder Instead,” I wanted to throw a birdfeeder at my computer screen. The holiday season is, of course, the biggest commercial moment in the toy company year. Slate just kept going with, “First Everyone Loved GoldieBlox. Now Everyone Hates GoldieBlox.” Hate is a strong word and I guess Slate figured that out since at this writing, they removed the above title and have given GoldieBlox a second look under the article, “GoldieBlox: Great for Girls? Terrible for Girls? Or Just Selling Toys?” Well good for you Slate for modifying your backlash after the fact. Sigh. Then when Jezebel recently wrote, “GoldieBlox Means Well But Doesn’t Live Up to the Hype,” I had to weigh in.

I’ve been in Women’s and Gender Studies since I was 19 years old. On the one hand, I welcome and get the onslaught of feminist critique of GoldieBlox that is now coming to a blog near you. On the other hand, I am no ideological purist and I wonder the degree to which critics grasp what it takes to break gender barriers in all these fields—STEM, toy industry, start-up/Silicon Valley culture—and make a toy that has mass appeal. I repeat—mass appeal.

My supportive response really comes from watching the toy work on the ground. I saw hundreds of girls play with GoldieBlox for an entire day. I watched as girl after girl mastered a “basic belt drive,” the first engineering challenge of the game and saw how they interacted with the “bill of materials” that is designed to be especially welcoming to girls—girls who rarely play with construction toys. Debbie made the wheels look like thread spools, the axles resemble crayons, and the belt mimic a thick hair ribbon. A hair ribbon is stereotypically feminine, but it’s likely a girl has seen one, unlike other construction toy parts that can appear off limits in gender-segregated toy aisles. Debbie conducted research for her start-up toy and discovered that girls would frequently turn her prototypes into non-competitive games. In other words, girls needed all the adorable animal characters to spin on the spinning machine or ride the float. Everyone needed to win. So Debbie redesigned the game.

Now as a gender critic, I know that girls are socialized into these sensibilities rather than born into them, but that fact does not make their gender socialization any less real. When my three year old picked up the toy, she gravitated first to the character animals just as GoldieBlox VP Lindsey Shepard had predicted. “The character animals are the way for girls to feel invited into engineering,” said Lindsey who urged us to reach out a hand with, say, Katinka the dolphin, and welcome a girl into play. The GoldieBlox mission is to make engineering as appealing a job for a girl as the pink-collar work that so many girls are still ushered into. Debbie’s basic gender critique in her Kickstarter video asserts a claim in Gender Studies about inequity and representation—engineering is still 89% male, women make up half the population, women and girls need to be building for a better, more inclusive future. Few toys offer such a gender critique which is why GoldieBlox had an initial feminist appeal.

Critics say about the toy: it has pink on it. And the second game is called “GoldieBlox and the Parade Float” where girls partake in dreaded “princess culture” and help build a parade float. It’s all true. The toy has pink on it, but is mostly yellow. Debbie talked about how using some pink was intentional. She aimed for girls to “want to pick the toy up,” in the first place. Debbie said recently to the New York Times, “It’s OK to be a princess. We just think girls can build their own castles too.” The deeper story of the princess float—and I loathe princess culture…I avoid saying the word out loud in my house—is that Goldie’s best friend, Ruby, who is African-American, is actually the winner of the pageant. This fact prizes afro-centric beauty in a racist culture that makes beauty synonymous with whiteness. Now it is certainly more troubling that Ruby is the best friend of Goldie and not Goldie herself. Goldie of the Blox is a white protagonist, a central critique that is rarely mentioned in the feminist response. Though I wonder if Goldie is “Golda,” an homage to Debbie’s Jewish foremothers. The Jewish cultural allowance for smart girls is something Debbie mentions in her TEDX talk. On the ground, watching girls play with the toy, they actually play with the animals in the set which are not necessarily racialized. The question remains: can a toy ever be designed (add books, movies, etc.) with a girl of color at the center? Girls and women are barely represented authentically in mass culture at all, let alone women of color. We know something will have shifted with a girl-of-color is at the center of a story.

So the answers to the GoldieBlox critiques are a bit more complicated. I appreciate critic Deborah Siegel’s more balanced provocatively titled piece, “Is GoldieBlox Trojan Princess, or Trojan Feminism?” I think it’s both. Which brings me back to my point about ideological purity. Why do we keep asking this binary question of “is it or isn’t it” feminist? Let’s step back and take the long view. The truth is I want GoldieBlox to have the same appeal as Bob the Builder or Lego dudes because girls still get nada in girl toy world. Like I teach my students—you can hold conflicting ideas simultaneously and still make a commitment. GoldieBlox is listening. Let’s commit to help them navigate the hyper-stereotyped toy world many of us are resisting by giving them some advice as The Brave Girls Alliance is doing with Lego when asking them to make smart girl Minifigs. I appreciate that GoldieBlox is trying to meet girls where they are. We can find the common ground between these worlds intellectually and maybe we can even find it around play. And even if we can’t, GoldieBlox is about to change play nationally regardless.

Recent Girl w/Pen posts—Stop the War on Pink—Let’s Take a Look at Toys for Boys by Tristan Bridges and CJ Pascoe, Who’s Afraid of the War on Pink from Girl w/Pen founder Deborah Siegel, and Girls, Boys, Feminism, Toys, a dialogue between Deborah and feminist author Rebecca Hains—all focus on how  ‘gender coding’ toys via color and sex specific illustrations harms kids of both sexes.  The discussion underlines how long feminist change can take. It also illustrates the popular influence of those who claim to be pro-child, but thread old, unfounded gender stereotypes throughout their public pronouncements and publications, promoting the notion that from birth girls and boys learn, play and relate in vastly different ways.

This makes it difficult to avoid letting discussions related to gender fall into a binary frame. As so many of us have pointed out for more years than I care to recall, these issues are not either/or, zero sum ones.  Much of the content and comments on the posts mentioned above have reiterated these points.  Yet hanging around in the public mind are ideas reflecting beliefs such as ‘helping girls equals hurting boys’ or ‘progress for boys is a set back for girls’ or ‘working on behalf of girls means ignoring boys’. Nonsense.  A gender equitable environment is one where assumptions of differences based primarily on one’s sex and/or gender affiliation are not part of the picture.  No serious feminist has ever argued otherwise.

In their post Deborah and Rebecca refer to Christina Hoff Sommers’ 2001 book, The War Against Boys . Sommers’ claimed that efforts on behalf of girls were a direct cause of much that was not working for boys in our nations schools.  I was one of the feminists who responded that actually, what was good for girls was also good for boys and vice versa.  Those of us, women and men, who shared this perspective, offered numerous examples: new methods of teaching science, better sex education, more physical activities for both boys and girls, a de-emphasis on traditional, option-limiting gender roles.

Of course, the hitch here is and always has been what is considered “good’.  If you want to continue the status quo, then you want to do all sorts of things that involve emphasizing gender differences— different toys, different teaching methods, different schools, different opportunities in sports and yes, even different signature colors.  This is a deeply conservative agenda.  It is an agenda that says,’ well, the roles of women and men have changed enough, we certainly don’t want anymore.’

It seems that the more  progress we make  toward less rigid gender roles, the more extreme the gender coding of toys becomes. Back in my December, 2012 post, Pink is for Girls, Black is for Boys, I noted that 2012 marked the fortieth anniversary of the best selling children’s record, Free To Be You and Me. Yet the Free To Be message—  everyone in our society needed a wider, less gender-specific range of choices and these choices should begin in childhood—was missing in the toy stores I visited.  The toys were far more color coded than four decades ago. Back then bikes, trucks, airplanes and even dolls sported a wide range of bright colors—red, green, yellow as well as shades of blue and rose.  The pink/lavender vs. black/ dark navy dichotomy is a division that, among other things, probably helps sales. Teach children and parents the color-code and you double your market.  What little brother will want to settle for his big sister’s pink tricycle?

But what may be good for sales is very bad for kids and ultimately for all of us. Rigid gender roles inhibit equality, limit individual flexibility, and rob us of our fullest selves.  Thank goodness for the Let Toys Be Toys Project and other similar efforts.

And lets not forget that whether the news media noticed or not, working for changes in gendered assumptions about male roles has been part of the feminist agenda for decades.  Change for women without change for men isn’t the change we hoped for fifty years ago and it isn’t the change feminist men and women, whether in the fields of women’s studies, girls’ studies, gender studies or masculinity studies are working for now.

In fact one of the great things about Girl w/Pen bloggers is that we span all these fields and more and we do so across traditional academic disciplines as well as generational lines.  When I directed the Wellesley Centers for Women, the sign on my desk read, “None of us is as smart as all of us.”   Girl w/Pen feels like my old office these days!

Heather Hewett’s December 5^th blog post on Girl w/Pen, “What’s a Good Mother?” hit a nerve. My daughter Amy was born in 1970, the same year Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex and Robin Morgan’s anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful were published.  Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique had already become part of my daily conversation. I read Firestone, Morgan, Germaine Greer, Our Bodies, Ourselves—everything I could find on ‘women’s liberation’.  It all made so much sense.  My husband and I agreed; we would share parenting. Our family wouldn’t follow the usual gender patterns, we’d be equal partners and we’d steer our daughter clear of sex stereotyped toys, clothes, and expectations.  A huge cultural shift was underway; we’d be part of it.

We have been; but not in the ways I anticipated forty years ago.  Children complicate lives in unexpected ways. Amy was born with a variety of disabilities, some immediately evident, others less so. She tested our facile feminism; we chose different answers. I am a single parent.

Parenting a child with physical and developmental challenges is a politicizing activity. Mothering such a child alone is a radicalizing one. Mothering a child with disabilities requires not only the culturally sanctified female roles of caregiving and ‘traditional good mothering’, but aggressive independent action. You must lobby the legislature, pressure the school board, argue with the doctor and defy the teacher. And, oddly, while these ‘unfeminine’ behaviors might, in other contexts, be deemed deviant or too aggressive, performed in the context of mothering a child with special needs they are considered appropriate, even laudable.

But for a single mother, even this culturally permissible deviance is insufficient. My life with Amy is different from the lives of most of my colleagues and friends. I could not provide emotional, physical and financial support for Amy without re-envisioning motherhood. Amy and I  have lived with a shifting assortment of male and female students, single women as well as married women with children. Work for me is not possible without round the clock care for Amy. This is true for all mothers and children, but it is a need that is normally outgrown. Not so in our case. Amy fuels my passion for feminist solutions; not simply for childcare, but for policy issues across the board. I know first hand too many of the dilemmas confronting women, from the mostly invisible, predominately female workers who care for others in exchange for poverty level wages to successful business women struggling to be perfect mothers, perfect wives and powerfully perfect CEOs.

While there may be no individual solutions, there are individual decisions. As a mother and a feminist, I long ago made the decision to work toward a society in which power and responsibility as well as independence and dependence are equally available to women and men.

But it’s a lovely winter day, snow is sparkling on the pine trees, and across the street children are sledding. To talk of the challenges of motherhood without sharing the lessons in joy Amy offers is only a part of the story.

My particular good fortune is in Amy’s special way of seeing the world. Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat writes about people he calls ‘simple’. “If we are to use single word here, it would have to be ‘concreteness’ — their world is vivid, intense, detailed, yet simple, precisely because it is concrete, nether complicated, diluted nor unified by abstraction.”  Amy never misses a sunset, a baby or a bird. She notices and she insists that others notice.

“Mother, come here! Now!”

“Amy, I’m busy, I’ll be there in a minute, OK?”

“No, not OK, red bird will fly away, come NOW!”

I hurry to see red bird.  What kind of silly person would think it reasonable to miss a cardinal in the snow?

This is only one of many joys my daughter has taught me.

It’s the Christmas season, a time of hope. Lately life has begun to look bleaker each day as we  move further  toward a nation of haves and have nots; but today I choose to believe in hope. Someday, not so far away, women and men working together will beat the odds. We will succeed in creating a more just and equal world.

In 1968 the documentary Hunger In America aired on CBS. The film exposed the prevalence of hunger and malnutrition in the United States. I was among the many who were shocked. The sight of children with distended bellies begging on the streets of Calcutta had kept me awake nights as I traveled back from my first job teaching in Taiwan. A year later I’d married a man who worked for CARE and often accompanied him distributing food and cooking oil to villagers in the Dominican Republic. I knew too many people in too many places were hungry every day. I knew that poverty and hunger were ugly killers.  But until the documentary aired I was ignorant of the extent of hunger and malnutrition in the United States.

The film and the outcry that followed generated additional Congressional support for efforts in various areas to make good use of food surpluses and feed people in need. By 1974 the Food Stamp Program, (now known officially as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), was operating across the nation.

Hunger continues to plague America, but for four decades food stamps have been one of the most effective and efficient federal efforts directed toward the alleviation the severe, long lasting consequences of malnutrition. The food stamps have done more than any other government program to lift children out of extreme poverty.

Thus last week’s passage of a farm bill without any consideration of food stamps and other food assistance programs, struck me as more than just another Congressional wrangle between political parties with divergent agendas. It went beyond the anti-woman/anti child proposals cloaked in pious platitudes. This was a vote in favor of hunger, a pro-poverty vote.

The republican rationale for separating farm policies from food for the hungry went like this: separation facilitates cuts to agribusiness subsidies; food stamps can be addressed later.  But few could miss the obvious agenda in conservative rhetoric: drastic cuts to ‘wasteful spending’ on nutrition programs for those seen as lazy, work adverse freeloaders responsible for swelling the ranks of program beneficiaries.

This rationale flies in the face of facts. Forty one percent of food stamp recipients live in households with at least one wage earner and less than ten percent of those receiving food stamps are also receiving welfare benefits.

Furthermore, years of data on the food stamp program indicate that in economic downturns more people need and use food stamps; but as the economy improves, the number needing assistance declines. Studies also reveal that more than seventy percent of food stamp recipients live in households with children, many headed by single working mothers; more than one-quarter live with senior citizens or people with disabilities. Put another way forty-seven percent of all those receiving food stamps are children and a significant number of recipients are unable to work due to debilitating conditions.

Far from being a rip off of taxpayer money, the SNAP program is an investment in the nation’s future. Research repeatedly shows that children with nutritious diets are healthier and do better in school than their malnourished classmates. Studies comparing children living in poverty who receive SNAP assistance with those who do not find consistent advantages in healthy development for program beneficiaries. Pregnant women with healthy diets give birth to healthier babies.

But the positive benefits of food stamps are not restricted to infants and children.  Benefits extend well in to adulthood. Last November the National Bureau of Economic Research released a working paper, “Long Term Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net”, co-authored by Hilary Hoynes, Diane Schanzenbach and Douglas Almond. Their research revealed that adults with access to food stamps as children in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in the final trimester in utero and early childhood, had significantly better health than adults from similar backgrounds who had not received nutritional assistance.  Better health included lower incidents of serious metabolic syndrome conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.  Furthermore, women receiving food stamp assistance as children fared better economically in adulthood. They were less apt to be receiving safety net benefits than similar adult women without access to food stamps during childhood.

Giving children a nutritious start in life is the first step in raising healthy, economically productive, community-minded citizens. No democracy can succeed with out such a citizenry.  We knew this more than sixty years ago when the first major pieces of the food stamp program were initiated. Today’s willful “forgetting”  is shortsighted and dangerous. Those who do so should not be allowed to argue that they “didn’t know the facts”. Ignorance of the law is not an acceptable excuse in legal proceedings; ignorance of fact should be viewed as equally unacceptable in matters of public policy.

For those of you who haven’t yet listened to NPR’s recent series on Native American families and foster care in South Dakota, click here.  The first part aired last week when I was running errands.  I immediately parked my car so that I could stop everything and listen.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve done something like that.  I’m a multitasker to the core, but I couldn’t think about groceries with this story on the radio.  I couldn’t stop listening, partly because I could not wrap my mind around what I was hearing.

All Things Considered reporters Laura Sullivan and Amy Walters dropped several bombshells in their story.  Consider the following list of their “key findings” from the web version:

* Each year, South Dakota removes an average of 700 Native American children from their homes. Indian children are less than 15 percent of the state’s child population, but make up more than half the children in foster care.

* Despite the Indian Child Welfare Act, which says Native American children must be placed with their family members, relatives, their tribes or other Native Americans, native children are more than twice as likely to be sent to foster care as children of other races, even in similar circumstances.

* Nearly 90 percent of Native American children sent to foster care in South Dakota are placed in non-native homes or group care.

* Less than 12 percent of Native American children in South Dakota foster care had been physically or sexually abused in their homes, below the national average. The state says parents have “neglected” their children, a subjective term. But tribe leaders tell NPR what social workers call neglect is often poverty; and sometimes native tradition.

* A close review of South Dakota’s budget shows that they receive almost $100 million a year to subsidize its foster care program.

What is going on here?  How is it possible that Native families are still being torn apart?

Native parents and grandparents have fought to keep their children for decades.  The United States began taking Native American children away from their families in the 1800s, sending them to boarding and missionary schools that would “civilize” them and cause them to assimilate into Anglo-American culture.  Native American activism in the 1960s and 1970s helped to bring this era to an end—but clearly many Native children remain vulnerable.  While some children may need a more stable home than the one their parent(s) are able to provide, it’s hard to understand the numbers in South Dakota: Native children comprise less than 15% of the population but more than half of children in foster care; 90% of Native children are sent to non-Native families or group care when they are legally supposed to be placed in the care of other Native Americans.

Louise Erdrich writes about a single Native mother, Albertine, who fights unsuccessfully to keep her child in the powerful short story “American Horse.”  Albertine’s passionate love for her son remains invisible to the social worker, Vicki Koob, a well-meaning woman with a “trained and cataloguing gaze” who sees only evidence of poverty and alcoholism as she surveys their small house.  She wishes to “salvage” the boy from his surroundings—as if his home is a trash heap or his family an impending shipwreck.

What if Vicki Koob were able to see what Erdrich sees?  What the reader is compelled to see?

Patricia Hill Collins argues that placing the experiences of mothers of color at the center of our vision enables us to understand motherhood differently.  In “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood,” she writes:

Whether because of the labor exploitation of African-American women under slavery and its ensuing tenant farm system, the political conquest of Native American women during European acquisition of land, or exclusionary immigration policies applies to Asian-Americans and Hispanics, women of color have performed motherwork that challenges social constructions of work and family as separate spheres, of male and female gender roles as similarly dichotomized, and of the search for autonomy as the guiding human quest. […] This type of motherwork recognizes that individual survival, empowerment, and identity require group survival, empowerment, and identity.

For these mothers, the biggest conflicts aren’t found inside their homes.  They lurk outside: the institutions and structures and ideologies that threaten to tear families apart.  So for Native American mothers (as for enslaved African-American mothers), “getting to keep one’s children and raise them accordingly fosters empowerment.”

So please, check out the story and leave your thoughts below.