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Girls and Legos – Oh My!

December 22, 2011 By

When you think of girls playing with Legos do you think of this?

Or this?

It's probably no surprise that I like the top image better!  And I wish I could say the same for Lego executives. In the next few days Lego will roll out brand new sets designed for girls ages 5 and up, with the theme, "Friends."  The sets were developed with four years (!) of research into what girls want from Legos. Some bloggers I love are trying to raise Lego's consciousness and I'm backing them up. Powered by Girl - PBG started the ball rolling. Supporters include  Pigtail Pals Reel Girl  Spark Summit.

My research was admittedly with a smaller sample. My daughters loved and played with Legos constantly back in the days before any "sets."  They built their own people from the basic red, green, blue & yellow pieces because we didn't have any people in our tub of pieces.  This led to people with wheels for feet and people of all shapes and sizes.

My point isn't to be nostalgic. Let's ask Lego to expand their vision of girls and their interests in the next round of sets they design for girls.

Just a suggestion, Lego:  Take the four girls from The 4th Motor team of Wisconsin who won the 2011 First Robotics Lego League North American open robotics challenge (1st all-girl team to win)!

One of the team shared some of their experiences and hard work in New Moon Girls' March-April 2011 magazine and on newmoon.com.  And here's some video of them winning the N.A. competition. All this, and a little herstory about the first computer programmer Ada Lovelace, encourages more girls to do creative problem-solving with Legos - inspiration, pure and simple.

This winning team of girls should lead development of Lego's next set for girls. I'm more than glad to help Lego learn out how to share power with girls in developing great products for them without reducing to lowest-common-denominator stereotypes.  It can be done and sustained, as we've done for nearly 20 years now.

What do you say Lego?

If you want to share this idea with Lego write to them and also post your letter here or on Facebook:

LEGO Systems, Inc.
555 Taylor Road
P.O. Box 1138
Enfield, CT 06083-1138
Filed Under: Communication, Creativity & Girls, Education & School, New Moon Girls News, Parents Who Advocate Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Today A Gift – Tomorrow Their Future

November 17, 2011 By

 

HUGE thanks to our 65 donors on  Give to the Max Day 11-16.  You donated $3,763! Our match from an anonymous donor brings the total to $7526!  I’m thrilled with your outpouring of support.  Especially as we only started the campaign on Nov 14.

Because of your generosity we will offer 251 MORE scholarships to New Moon Girls for low-income girls.  With most of the scholarships going to organizations, libraries and schools where 50 or more girls benefit from each membership, that conservatively means that 12,801 more girls will be reached in the next year. Your gift means we won’t have to leave girls, schools and libraries starving for healthy media.

A very special thanks to the Rider family who will receive a beautiful Celebrate Girls poster by artist Farah Aria.

Thank You for giving girls the lasting gift of empowering media.

 

Filed Under: Communication, Creativity & Girls, New Moon Girls News Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Help win $1000 – $10,000 for New Moon Girls scholarships – donate just $10

November 15, 2011 By

On Give to the Max Day, Wednesday Nov. 16, you can do just that!

This special day for non-profits gives you the incredible opportunity to join with others and donate to our non-profit partner Mind on the Media to support the New Moon Girls scholarship fund. Our goal is supporting hundreds of girls with the power of positive media that New Moon Girls gives them.

Why is your gift so important on this day?

We donate many memberships to low-income girls. But the need is greater than our small organization can meet on its own. Your donation means that we won’t have to leave girls, schools and libraries starving for healthy media.  And for just $10 (or more!) on Give to the Max Day, you’ll get us that much closer to this goal!

Your gift will go further on Give to the Max Day! 

Your gift won’t only benefit our girls’ futures but it can also help:

1) Win a Golden Ticket! $1,000 will be given to a random donor’s charity every hour. You could be one of those 24 lucky donors!  At the end of the day one donor will be awarded a $10,000 Grand Prize Golden ticket donation for their charity – that could be YOU! Improve your odds of winning the Golden ticket in the following ways:

  • Night Owl? Give between 12am – 5am Central Standard Time on November 16 – in other time zones it will be earlier or later – check time zones at http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc
  • Give multiple $10 donations at different hours throughout the day

2) We have a matching grant of $5000 on Give to the Max Day – that’s over 150 more scholarships for girls who otherwise would not have access to New Moon Girls. But we need your help to earn this match.

On Nov. 16, let’s give something back to our girls- positive media to inspire and empower them!  Let’s Give to the Max!

Thank You

Nancy Gruver, Founder

 

p.s. Win a Original Art Poster & Acclaim! If you inspire your friends to raise $500 as a group for NMG scholarships on Nov. 16, we will send you a beautiful Celebrate Girls poster with original artwork by Farah Aria. Plus we’ll feature a picture of you and your achievement in our e-news and on our web page! Click here now to set up your own campaign.

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Creativity & Girls, Education & School, New Moon Girls News, Parents Who Advocate Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Girls Now: Halloween Sexualization Hurts Imagination

October 12, 2011 By

via SheHeroes.org

Halloween was one of my very favorite holidays with Nia & Mavis. I loved it all, from helping them create costumes, to carve pumpkins, to visit the neighbors for treats. It’s totally fun to dress up and pretend to be a different person, an animal, your fave food, a character from a book or comic, whatever you want to imagine being.

But in the past decade the fun of wearing a costume has become a tighter and tighter straightjacket of sexualization for girls. While sex fantasy has long been part of adult costumes, the costumes now being marketed to girls ages 4 and up disturb me with the exploitiveness that’s pouring down on young kids. The store-bought choices are highly sexualized and play on adult fantasies, bringing porn to mind, rather than kids’ imaginations and wide horizons.

This is a terrible loss for girls. Instead of using their own fantastic imaginations to come up with, and even make, a costume, they’re marketed the message that they should just be something sexy.Two parts of this are awful:

  • Girls are told to be some “thing” rather than some “one.” It makes them into objects, not people.
  • Girls’ imaginations are crippled by the narrow, outdated, powerless roles the costumes imply.

Try a few on for size. The Monster High costume that Peggy Orenstein found at Toys R Us. Or the Convict Cutie Dr. Jennifer Shewmaker saw in her local costume shop.

Then, just for a breather, get inspired by wonderful costume ideas on SheHeroes and the idea of an Astronaut Makeover on Princess Free Zone. Those sound like they’d be actual fun to me, not the cause of a difficult conversation about why sexy isn’t appropriate for a girl’s costume.

To talk with other parents about how we can help our kids understand, and successfully fight back against the marketing of sexualized costumes for kids, join me and four other awesome advocates for girls on October 13.

Thursday October 13  at 9pm est/8 cst/7 mst/6 pst for a chat on Twitter. Follow hash tag  #girlsnow. Add it to the end of your tweet so we can see your question or comment. 

Before the chat  follow @Nancy_Newmoon, @PigtailPals, @BeABetterWoman, @AudreyBrashich, @DrRobyn .

If you’re not on Twitter you can still participate live on my blog. We want to hear from you!

If you can’t make it live, the transcript will be available afterward at my blog.

My c0-advocates are:

Amy Harman of Becoming A Better Woman

Dr. Robyn Silverman, author of Good Girls Don’t Get Fat

Melissa Wardy of Pigtail Pals

Audrey Brashich, author of All Made Up

 

Filed Under: Communication, Creativity & Girls, Family Life, Health & Safety Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Forgive and Begin Again in Love

August 6, 2011 By

One of the hardest things for me is to forgive myself when I screw up. I also can have trouble forgiving others–the two issues go hand-in-hand. That’s why I was touched and captivated by an e-book about forgiveness a New Moon Girls member posted in her online room recently. Of course I want to be the best parent I can be and I know what a huge effect I have on my daughters’ lives. But the pressure I put on myself to be a perfect mom was terribly oppressive and not good for me or them. Meg Hunter’s guest post is a wonderful story about forgiving, and teaching our daughters to do it too. Meg is raising three daughters for the 21st century while also teaching  graphic design and marketing to technical college students.

On our refrigerator is a pink and purple sign that reads “We forgive ourselves; we forgive each other; and we begin again in love.”  As a mother of three daughters, Rachel (13), Lauren (11) and Caitlin (9) it is something I refer to often.

The sign originated from a Unitarian service about Yom Kippur and the Days of Turning. The Days of Turning are a time to consider your life and the things that might be keeping you from having good relationships with your friends, family and neighbors.  After the service we created the sign to help remember the lesson.

One of the most important phrases for our kids is “we forgive ourselves”.  Our youngest, Caitlin, sometimes gets in to a spiral of bad behavior that is hard to get out of.  She will say things she doesn’t mean at home and on the playground.  We found that when she learned to forgive herself, forgiving others became easier.

Our middle daughter, Lauren, can be very hard on herself.  She expects perfection in everything she does. If she gets a “B” in any subject we give her a cake because letting go and being OK with a “B” is an achievement for her! For her, forgiving herself is about accepting mistakes and knowing she did the best she could.

Sometimes the tables get turned and my children teach me a lesson. 

Recently, one of my daughters had an issue with a coach for her soccer team.  I contacted the coach and requested a meeting. Instead of meeting with me, the coach and her assistant pulled my daughter aside and chose to ask her a series of questions about the issue.

The coach emailed me and let me know she met with my daughter.  I was furious, disappointed and felt horrible that I had put my daughter in that situation.

When she arrived home, I told her how sorry I was.  I told her I would have never requested the meeting if I thought she would be put in a situation with two adults confronting her alone. By this time, I had tears running down my face.

Lauren looked at me and said, “Mom, I need you to do something for me.”

I said, “Of course, what is it?”

She said, “I need you to do what you always tell us,”

“What is that?” I asked,

“Forgive yourself, forgive each other and begin again in love.  I need you to forgive Coach Klein.  The coach has a lot of responsibility, a lot of kids and parents who depend on her and she has a new baby. Can you forgive Coach Klein?”

I wiped away my tears, smiled and said, “Yes, I can.”

As a parent, I try to provide my children with a strong foundation. It is nice to know that sometime the lessons my husband and I have tried to teach get applied to their everyday lives.  Especially when you are the student and your child is the teacher. Thank you Rachel, Lauren and Caitlin for the lessons you have taught me. You are all wise beyond your years and I am so blessed to be your mother.

Thankfully, it’s become easier to forgive myself and others by seeing my daughters bounce back from bad decisions and mistakes I’ve made as their mom. It turns out they didn’t need me to be perfect in order for them to become wonderful adults. How lucky for them and me, both! Remembering how resilient all kids are helps me keep things in perspective. And, I keep working out my “forgiving muscle” to make it stronger. How do you strengthen your and your daughters’ forgiving muscle?

Filed Under: Communication, Creativity & Girls, Family Life Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,