PEOPLE from Torfaen are backing a national campaign aimed at changing the way in which retailers market children’s toys.

The Let Toys Be Toys campaign is pushing retailers to stop promoting some toys for girls and others for boys.

The campaign launched an online petition, which states “please stop limiting children’s imaginations and interests by promoting some toys as only suitable for girls and others only for boys.

“In 2013 it is time to take down the signs, labels and categories that tell parents, grandparents and children that construction sets, adventure games, science toys and superheroes are toys for boys, and that baby dolls, play kitchen, make-up sets, fashion, princesses and crafts are toys for girls.

“Please sort toys by theme or function, rather than by gender, and let the children decide which toys they enjoy best.”

Cwmbran father Ben Black said: “Girls’ toys tell girls that they should play with babies and wear sparkly make-up to look nice. Boys’ toys say ‘learn about science’, being active and engineering.

“To me that is telling girls to limit your ambitions and don’t get involved in stuff which needs intelligence and thought.” His seven-year-old daughter, Mollie, recently bought a Nerf gun with her birthday money, and the pair turned their garden shed into an army headquarters.

He said: “I don’t think I’ve encouraged my daughter to play with boys’ toys. It has always been ‘play with what you want to have fun’. If on her next birthday she wanted to buy a pink Barbie doll I’d be fine with that.”

Torfaen councillor for the Llantarnam ward David Daniels showed his support by signing the petition.

He said: “I’ve long found the notion of gender stereotyping children’s toys ridiculous because young boys don’t initially think, ‘that’s blue I should play with that, but that’s pink, that’s for girls’.

"Children just play with whatever takes their fancy until told otherwise.”

He explained that his reason for signing the petition was because childhood is an important age of development, where a child’s sense of identity is instilled.

He said: “We need look no further than glossy magazines to see grotesquely exaggerated models of femininity in celebrities, whose extreme appearance are routinely promoted as something that girls should aspire to.

Something needs to change and it starts with how we label children.”

Gender stereotyping ‘getting worse’

MISS Torfaen, Charlotte Hunt, 20, from Pontypool, said: “I believe that girls and boys should be able to play with any suitable toy of their choice, whether it be pink, blue, a Barbie, a baby doll, a football, a soft animal, or a toy car, as long as it makes them happy.”

Miss Hunt says as a child she was described as a tomboy as she used to love the outdoors and playing football and climbing trees with her two younger brothers.

Manager at Busy Bees Nursery in Blaenavon, Susan Driscoll, said: “I believe that there is definitely a gender stereotype created around toys, and it’s worse now than ever before.

“In the nursery I have boys coming up to me and saying they can’t drink out of pink cups because they are for girls.”

Miss Intercontinental Wales Chloe-Beth Morgan, from Cwmbran, disagrees that marketing toys towards boys or for girls will have an effect on children.

She said: “Playing with girly toys didn’t affect me.

I’m not very girly now, even though I can turn it on when it comes to the pageants, its not influenced me in my day to day life.”