Subversive Princesses

I'm going to try to do a series on gifts for children this holiday season. This will be the first of a few, hopefully.

Here's the issue I want to tackle: sometimes the little girls in your life become princess obsessed. This can be worrisome, because you don't want them to grow up idolizing pretty faces who don't do much. But once they latch on, it can be tricky to get them interested in anything else.

So if you have a little girl you love who is determined that she is a “princess”, the best thing you can do is teach her that princesses and fashionable people can do all sorts of things!

Without further ado, here's my list of subversive princess toys:

The Secret Lives of Princesses by Philippe Lechermeier

Hey, books TOTALLY count as toys! There are a great number of subversive princess picture books, and I highly suggest checking them all out, but this is one of my favorites. It's really kind of a coffee table book, dense and beautiful. It's not meant to be read all at once, but flipped through. It contains beautiful art and beautiful stories about all different kinds of princesses. There's even a princess with a long beard. It's the best altogether image I can think of giving children that lets them know that princesses are whole and interesting people (and thus women are whole an interesting people... since they are taught from an early age that women are “princesses”).

Groovy Girls

  

Notall of these dolls are princesses, but they are all “fashion” dolls. They're a really nice alternative to Barbie. For one, these dolls wear no makeup, and have generically “child shaped” bodies. And generally speaking, the dolls themselves are pretty modest. Modesty should not, of course, be forced upon girls, but I think showing them that if you want you can be fashionable & modest is a good thing. So often they are pitted against one another. The other wonderful thing about this line is that each doll has a slightly different skin tone, and they run quite a gamut. Instead of having a “token” doll of color, Groovy Girls agknowledges that there is a whole array of living, breathing people who look different ways.

GoldieBlox & the Parade Float

 

GoldieBlox is a brand new company who became famous almost overnight when their kickstarter campaign went viral. I have some issues with the gender essentialist language used in marketing the toys (talking about girls “innate” verbal skills instead of their “ingrained” verbal skills), but the toy itself is really fantastic, so I'm going to let it slide. Goldie is a girl engineer who uses engineering to solve her problems. As kids read Goldie and her friend's stories, they play along, building simple machines to solve problems along with the book. It's a great way to get kids invested in engineering, and this kit is even themed around her princess-pageant-competing friend, Katinka!

Nancy B's Science Club

 

Now, Nancy B isn't a princess. But she is a woman.  And there might be just enough purple on this toy to get “girly girls” involved. Another product created by a female scientist, Nancy B's Science Club integrates traditionally “girly” things (keeping notebooks) and hard science.

End Note: if you don't have to get the “girlified” version of something in order to hold a girl's interest, don't, unless you have some other reason she'd like it better. Never buy the pink version of a toy JUST because she's a girl. There is no reason girls can't like green, blue, skulls and other “boy things”. This list is really only for those times you have a girl who rejects things outright that aren't “girly”. And of course, ALL of the items on this list are also perfectly good gifts for little boys, provided they are somewhat open-minded.