Little girl unloads on toy industry's double standard

By: Bailey Johnson
Topics: Viral Video

(CBS) - Girls like superheroes too! That's the lesson in this educational video, where a young girl named Riley rails against the toy industry's marketing practices. "The companies that make these try to trick the girls," Riley tells us.

Now that the holiday shopping is over, it's important to take a good hard look on just how all the toys we buy our daughters and sons are packaged. Boys like pink stuff sometimes too!

Riley, who is clearly wise beyond her years, makes some good points about the packaging of toy manufacturers. But with the next holiday shopping season so far away, let's take this less as an indictment of Big Toy and more as motivation for all of us (especially you, toy marketers) to do a better job in the new year.

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by rwsmith29456 December 29, 2011 10:22 PM EST: I like her thinking and she expresses herself so well!; Reply to this comment


by jt92202 December 29, 2011 5:57 PM EST: She is adorable!!! Maybe Toy Companies should listen to the kids they make these toys for instead of the adults that make them!! They should hire this little girl, she looks like she could tell some of those makers off pretty well!! LOL!; Reply to this comment


by angelofurnightmare December 29, 2011 2:21 PM EST: HIlarious...reminds me of my oldest child..he went thru a girl toy phase where he liked alot of the girl stuff and got so upset it was all in pink...not because pink is a girly color just bc he personally doesn't like pink lol...I think kids should be allowed to play with whatever they like...I was a tomboy and played with my brothers stuff more than my own (4 girls and 1boy in our family growing up) and my brother was stuck playing barbie alot bc majority rules lol; Reply to this comment


by MegaProcrastination December 29, 2011 12:33 PM EST: Riley reminds me so much of my own kids when they were little! I was a kid way back in the sixties but my parents raised us without gender barriers at least partially because my dad had been raised without them. He grew up in a family with mostly sons and although they were busy with farming, Granddad always made sure at least one of the boys was available to help Grandma with the housework. Then my siblings were all girls so it was up to us to help our dad with whatever he needed.

My favorite toys were Tinker Toys and Tonka trucks. I played with those WAY more than I ever played with my dolls. During the summer my younger sister and I spent hours outside building roads with the grader and cat and running the trucks all over them. Some of our best friends were twin boys a couple of years younger than me. We'd go to their house and play in their big sisters' playhouse and they were just as comfortable with baby dolls as they were with trucks and it showed in their parenting skills when they started having their own families.

When I'd shop for my own kids sometimes my husband, who was raised in a fairly gender-restrictive environment, would question what I had bought them for Christmas or their birthdays. It took him a while to wrap his head around the fact that girls actually DO like trucks and super-hero action figures.; Reply to this comment


by barbaram99 December 28, 2011 10:00 PM EST: Yep. She does. When I was a girl.I would play with boy toys--trucks,army men etc. I did not care for dolls.; Reply to this comment


by credibility2 December 28, 2011 8:56 PM EST: This is priceless and sweet. She gets it, but the so-called intelligent toy makers and marketers don't.; Reply to this comment