"Roar, Büsi"
The fact that my mum once kept me as far away as possible from anything pink did little to dampen my fondness for pink toys. Nevertheless, I believed that I would be spared my sons' desire for evil-faced dinosaurs if I just kept putting cute little wooden animals in front of them.
So there I was, standing in front of the Büsi mothership. A whole childhood had obviously not been enough to drive the love for this kitten out of me and now, at the age of 27, blissful and exhilarated to an absolutely inappropriate degree, I entered the Hello Kitty flagship store in Tokyo for the first time. Five floors of concentrated cuteness, smiling hamburgers with arms made of fries, softly drawn animals in mint green and lilac colours, a trip on the rainbow. Apart from me, there were only a few scruffy-looking Japanese women wandering around the shelves that afternoon. At some point, I began to wonder whether anyone who, after graduating from university, still falls into a state of intoxication because of a chick with a bow on her ear, will inevitably end up in a pink, littered twelve-square-metre flat in a Tokyo suburb one day. I hurried to the checkout with a "My Melody" toothbrush jar and two "Little Twin Stars" stamp sets.
Fast forward thirteen years: I'm standing in front of the animal figures in the toy shop with my sons. The decisive purchase criterion: Does the animal open its mouth wide enough? Is its facial expression suitable for the soundtrack that my three-year-old auteur filmmaker has created for multi-layered works such as "The Hippopotamus Strikes Back", "Triceratops vs. Brown Bear: Requiem" and "Like a Wild Bull - in the Rented Flat"?
Back at home, the boys painstakingly create a zoo of snarling animals, only to have their members snort and growl at each other. "Mummy, I can roar like a gorilla! ", the little boy tells me after a while, beaming with joy, and demonstrates how he can pounce on an alligator. I nod and move Janosch's adorable tiger duck, which has been sitting unnoticed on the shelf for years, a little more into his field of vision. Have all those picture books with fluffy little sheep and clumsy little deer made no impression at all? And how many times have we looked at the story of Boris the frog, which tells such a wonderful tale of exclusion, friendship and generosity? Why are my sons' role-playing games constantly about who is wrestling who to the ground and that an angry crocodile is snapping at a child's tight little legs, but of course the child's tight little legs know how to put the animal to flight with a well-directed kick? What actually happened to my "Little Twin Stars" stamp set that I bequeathed to them?
Scientists have found that even among three-month-olds, girls look longer when a doll is held out to them and boys look longer when a lorry is placed in front of them. Similarly, a British psychologist recently came to the conclusion that toddler boys reach for a shovel when presented with a few gender-typical toys, while toddler girls are more likely to reach for a toy saucepan - even though outdated role models had not had much time to take root in the minds of the next generation. One explanation is that biology has more of a hand in this than is generally thought. Girls are often ahead in terms of fine motor skills and better at reading faces, while male babies move more and are more interested in spatial perception. This all has an effect on early toy preferences; and what the other boys then say in kindergarten and the extensive marketing efforts of the toy industry probably contribute to the differences later on.
But there is hope. Because when my three-year-old isn't involved in the role of a predator, he likes to grab a few wet wipes from the changing table and scrub everything from park benches to his afternoon apple with a level of dedication that neither my husband nor I could ever have modelled for him. Maybe we should just let the children do it.
A passionate journalist and mother of two sons who moved from Zurich to Lisbon with her husband in 2014. Does her writing in cafés and appreciates that life has been treating her well in general. <br><a href="http://uemityoker.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">uemityoker.wordpress.com</a>