Should We Have ‘Boy Toys’ and ‘Girl Toys?’

According to a recent Boston.com story, there is a movement to stop identifying toys as gender-specific, in order to remove any stigma from, say, boys playing with Barbie dolls or girls playing with G.I. Joe.

The story believes that this gender identification of toys began in the 1980s, when the FCC removed restrictions and allowed manufacturers to directly market their products to certain children, combined with the niche audience of cable television.

As a child of the 80s, I grew up at a time when every toy had a cartoon and a breakfast cereal. It was an ingenious promotional tool, these multi-platform tie-ins, and if I loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles enough to watch the cartoon and play with the toys, well they surely I had to also choke down their crappy cereal (seriously, Ralston--we all knew you were just repackaging the same terrible stuff under different characters on the box, but we still made our parents buy it anyway).

But the boys still played with "boy toys," and the girls played with "girl toys." Sure, you might occasionally see me trying out my sister's Skip-It, but we stuck to our gender-specific toys, and nobody was traumatized or socially handicapped as a result.

How do you feel about the idea that certain toys are for boys or girls? Should it remain that way, or should we promote all toys for all kids?