I bought two LEGO® Girls Fantasy Buckets for my daughter today. Before when I have seen legos targeted at girls, the kits were less of the traditional legos, and more stuff that was big set pieces with a single function. That sucks. They were only good for the one thing and left no room for creativity. This one is great. Mind you, we get her plenty of other legos, but it is nice to see a general purpose lego set for girls that is not lame.
I hate to come in and nitpick, but the plural form of Lego is, in fact, Lego- not “Legos”.
Legos sounds like either an Italian Pasta Sauce brand or the capital of some West African third-world country, dammit!
Seriously though, I agree it’s nice to see Lego kits targeted at girls that have more than one function. It seems the trend for general Lego kits is towards the single-purpose use, though- lots of big, pre-moulded pieces that can only be used for one thing.
The Knights 2000 Lego series is especially bad for this- many of the castle parts are clearly designed ONLY to be part of a castle, and nothing else. The Vikings set looked like it was heading the same way, which is about the point I pretty much gave up on collecting Lego.
I remember a time when all Lego was intended for either sex. What happened?
And how is it that the regular, unisex Lego seems to have ended up being “for boys,” rather than regular Lego being “for girls” and their having to introduce new sets “for boys”?
I’m guessing it’s when they started selling ‘kits’ to make one thing rather than the boxes of generic blocks that allowed kids to make whatever the hell they liked outta the rotten little bastards.
Appealing to the parents of course, not the kids. :rolleyes:
Well, first you have the colors, the strong red, blue, yellow which are used for boys’ toys and not hardly ever for girls’ toys. Then add to it that nearly every little lego person is male. So are the majority of the kids used in images on their site. If girls and boys appear in the same picture, it seems girls are not in the primary position, but are to the left and lower or to the rear of the setting. I just looked through the sets, and it seems that at most, they have one girl character in them, outside of the sucky Belleville line. And please, don’t tell me about historical accuracy means that every character in the castle set or Viking sets had to be male; it is obvious they don’t care about historical accuracy. Add to that the violent themes of so many of the kits, and the fact that when you look up lego for girls on their site you get the one brick bucket I found and the sucky belleville line. It all adds up to the message that lego is for boys.
Still, I am not making the mistake my parents made and not getting lego for my daughter. Building with legos are fun. She has several duplo brick buckets and a few primo brick buckets. My brother got legos, I did not. I generally did not get toys to be played with, I got pretties that sat on shelves. I hated that. I do like that they have a brick bucket aimed at little girls. I hope they continue and have larger sets with more of the same colors. I hope they start having more female figures.
I bought an off brand set of people compatible with lego and about half the little figures not in head encasing helmets seem to be female, denoted mainly by the hairstyles. All the bodies are interchangeable, so the clearly female heads are not restricted to any profession (there are doctors, police, fire fighters, etc.). It makes it easier to imagine that any of the little figures could be female, even the little helmet figures.
As the mom of a 2-year-old girl, this is a subject that really, really irritates me. ALL of the “girl’s toys” are pink and lavender colored now. Why why why should there be 2 sets of legos? Why should the ones that are themed like pirate ships and castles be for boys, anyway? And why, in order to market stuff to girls, does it have to be pink? I don’t blame the companies, so much…I blame people who are buying these toys for girls who want everything in these little girls’ lives to be pink and princessy and frou-frou. Arrrgh! I can’t STAND it!
I just wanted to chime in with my complete agreement, and also add that I really must find an excuse to use “frou-frou” in conversation somehow this week. 
Wait until your two year old is four and looks at the red and blue legos and tells you they are for boys.
I used to think gender segregation in kids was bullshit. Then I had a girly girl and a boyie boy thirteen months apart. He had dolls and she had trains - and she played with his dolls and he played with her trains. I dressed her in boy handmedowns - but from the time she could express her wants, she wanted “lellow” and “pink.”
Is it socialization - possibly. They watch TV and go to daycare. But it does seem to go deeper than that - my son was the only boy in daycare until he was two - and he was the one playing with the trucks at eighteen months.
One of my raving feminist girlfriends claims her son came with a genetric predisposition for making truck noises while driving blocks around the floor and turning sticks into guns - neither toy she allowed in the house and hers weren’t daycare kids.
Actually, I believe that that there are inherent differences in the way that boys & girls play, behave, have preferences, etc. I believe this quite strongly…I’m not sure, however, that this extends to colors…I think that part is mostly socialization. My daughter is more of a tom-boyish kind of girl right now, and is obsessed with trains and cars, and it bugs me that the toys are color-coded so that she will be trained to think that because the trains and the trucks aren’t pink, then they aren’t for her. She doesn’t get it yet, but I have a feeling she will catch on pretty soon. If she was a girly-girl type, that would be fine, too, but it bugs me that something as basic as a COLOR of a toy is going to end up shaping her preferences.
And it works both ways…the dollhouse at daycare is pink, but the toddler boys like to play with it. It won’t be long before they start realizing that it’s pink, and that boys don’t play with pink toys.
It’s kind of funny, because my favorite color is pink, and I dress the kid in pink clothes all the time. But she doesn’t care much about clothes or relating to colors yet.
Well, this kit has fuchsia, orange, light and medium green, and lots of white, not pale pink, and isn’t frou-frou in my opinion. The building suggestions include a house, some girls, a dining area with dishes, a bed, cats, horses, and flowers. Also it has some of the tiniest fiddliest pieces I have ever seen. The first thing my daughter wanted to do is to make the big girl, which she identified, with pride, as being like herself. Then she wanted to make the bed and the little girl. When I told her it was too late to be making noise, she read them a bedtime story.
My daughter seems to care that the kit showed female figures. She wanted to build someone like herself.
That’s cool. I have noticed that my daughter relates much better to female dolls than male. She likes the babies in the dollhouse to be girls, and she thinks the baby we are having will be a girl.
My mom has her PhD in child development, and she told me the other day that the absolute best thing you can do for young children is have toys with lots of small pieces to manipulate & put together in various ways, so this set sounds terrific for a boy or a girl! 
I’m nostalgiac for the free-for-all sets myself, but where do you get the idea that kids don’t want the project kids, but parents do? Have you SEEN the Christmas want list for kids these days? It is always very specific – this particular Star Wars vehicle lego kit, and this particular dinosaur, etc. If it weren’t for their kids’ demanding them, parents would happily buy the cheaper free-for-all kits.
Well, we dont’ let her watch any kids TV commercials, or much TV, so we don’t get this. We also do not buy her or allow her to wear visibly branded clothing. She does ask for things, but it tends to be general, like a request for maps of Africa and the United States, or a skirt to spin in that will go way out. Sometimes she is very specific as to color, but never brand.
Hell, my kids don’t get much commercial TV but they do watch movies, and I will tell you that the Jabba the Hutt Sail Barge LEGO kit was a must-have for the 7 year old (took me forever to build it… 
).
If if you are looking for itty bitty pieces to constantly step on and vacuum up, may I recommend Bionicles?
And that one includes a female figure, doesn’t it?
No. Well, maybe.
It looks as though Lego has re-introduced the basic kits with rectangles and free-for-all design (although every Lego set I’ve seen has come with “suggestion” sheets that most kids take as dogma), but ten years ago, they did not have them available. Anywhere. Not even the hippie educational toy stores had just plain ol’ Lego. Every Lego you could buy came in a predetermined kit.
It became model building, not creative play. Every step to build The One and Only Thing You Could Build With This Set was provided, with diagrams. I finally took to throwing out the directions and giving my kid the picture on the front of the box. He had to figure out how it all went together. Still didn’t get him creatively playing with Lego, but at least developed his spatial skills and got him thinking, rather than mindlessly following the diagrams. (He’s now a fantastic Ikea furniture assembler!)
I’m glad the basic sets are back, I really am. There was a whole decade or more of kids who have no idea that Lego was ever designed to be a creative toy.
Oh, and if we’re keeping tally, count me in for votes of “Boys and girls inherently like different *styles *of play, although the same toys” and “*Colors *are not inherently preferred by either gender, marketing makes it so.”
(WhyKid (boy) loved stuffed animals and dolls just as much as his sister. He loved to line them up on the floor and run them over with his truck. He also bit a piece of toast into a gun shape and said “Bang, bang, Mommy!” from his highchair at age 2. I cannot figure out for the life of me where he saw a gun, toy or otherwise. We didn’t even OWN a television at that point!)
I’m not sure what part of my post you’re disagreeing with, since you confirm my speculation that parents prefer the basic kits.
I disagree that kids asked for the specialized kits rather than the basic kits out of choice. They asked for what was there, not being given the choice of a basic kit.
I’m not speaking in the past tense. Kids on my christmas list, right now, and for the past few years, have asked for very specific project kits, usually star wars related, although also vikings related (or was it pirates?)