Toy Op-ed Reflection

Toy companies are sexist whether we want to believe it or not. Whether that is for guns being made mostly for boys, or nurse kits being created for girls. Nerf was created for boys to use. In the early years of Nerf, there were no girls in any of the commercials. In recent years, Nerf has come out with pink guns and bows to "appeal" to girls. Toy trucks and cars did the same thing. When I was younger, there were only blue trucks and black cars for kids to play with, for they were mostly targeted towards boys. Barbies were mostly targeted towards girls and the company even came out with "Ken" to try to come off as not sexist. As I grew up, I saw that while boys were given guns and told to pretend like they were in the army and such, while girls were told to play with barbies and nurse kits. This is still a debate happening not just in our own society but others as well. "What would you do?," a tv show that tests what ordinary people would do in certain circumstances, did a episode where they had a female child asking to get a truck, and a male child asking to get a barbie. The outcome was almost balanced between the people who told the "parents" (the actors playing the parents) to let the kid get what he/she wanted, and the people who told the "parents" to just not get anything for the child until the "phase" wore off and the child would go back to playing with toys made for their gender. To me, this is very personal, for as a child I went against these gender rules and played with toy cars, pretended to be spider-man and power rangers, and all that stuff. I think that kids should be the ones to determine what they want to play with, because it doesn't matter if a boy plays with barbies and a girl plays with trucks and fake pistols as long as they are happy right?