I don’t know much about Dora, but what I do know I’m not too impressed with (such as every adventure ending in prizes or rewards). I’m also in no rush to get my daughter into the ‘princess culture’. So I find shopping for her to be a challenge I had not anticipated.
She’s not yet 2, so maybe she’s too young to be really influenced by a pink princess chair or a Dora the Explorer colouring book. But then again, my daughter is a little sponge and is always catching us by surprise with the words and the things she knows that neither my husband or I remember teaching her.
I heard a bit of an interview with Peggy Orenstein, a woman who wrote a book called Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. I haven’t yet read the book, but certainly relate to the author’s consternation over the gender stereotyping in products geared to young children.
One could argue that it’s not really some nefarious plot to turn all little girls into brainless pretty things, but rather that companies have realized that by making a blue train version and a pink princess version, they can almost double their sales. Disney raked in $4-billion in 2009 with their Disney Princess merchandise line.
But one could also argue, as Orenstein does, that we are locking our children from a young age into certain narratives. We’re teaching them which behaviours are valuable, which are not – and the behaviours modeled to girls and those which are modeled to boys are certainly not the same. Some even say that the princess culture contributes to the sexualization of little girls, others that it breeds narcissism and a sense of entitlement.
Of course I don’t think it is the end of the world if M goes through a stage of wanting to be a princess. But I certainly am not going to encourage it.
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