Toca Magazine’s Kid’s-Eye View project helps adults see the world through the eyes of kids. For Kid’s-Eye View: Hair, we wanted to find out more about how kids feel about their hair, and what it means to their identity. What are three adjectives you’d use to describe your hair? Magdalena, 10, Indiana: long, thick, straight Maddison, […]

Rockin’ a new hairstyle can be fun for anyone. But if a kid wants a unique ‘do, they may get tangled up in tensions with parents, school rules or the social norms in their community. There’s a lot of ways to wear hair, from an array of colors to an asymmetric cut to a shaved […]

Three things to know if you say yes: 1. It may be more meaningful than you expect. But you won’t know that until you let them do it. For kids who hate haircuts, they may stress far less with longer hair or dreadlocks, knowing the next cut won’t be anytime soon. For kids who crave […]

“When I was your age…” I remember my mother saying this to me repeatedly growing up, but never thought I’d be saying it myself one day. However, that’s exactly how I started a recent conversation about hair with one of the girls in my arts and culture program. When I entered the room, a sweet, […]

Toca Magazine sat down with Mathilda Engman, head of merchandise and collaborations for Toca Boca, to chat about the company’s approach to building gender-neutral toys. Q: Toca Boca’s toys are described on TocaBoca.com as being gender neutral. Where does this value come from? A: It comes from the belief in equal rights, and that no child […]

Gender is only a part of who we are, but it is a big part. Even before we are born, gender begins its work dictating everything from the color palette of the nursery to the type of clothing the baby will wear to expectations about attitudes and behaviors. However, despite the structuring role gender has […]

Offer variety in toys. Expose your child to a wide range of toys — not just those that reinforce traditional gender roles — and give them the opportunity to play with all of them. Listen to your child. Affirm your child’s interests and capabilities irrespective of their conformity to gender expectations. If your child likes […]

As I walked down the main aisle of a local toy store last weekend, I noticed the signs overhead marking the rows to my left: Star Wars, Sports, and Bikes and Wheels. On the right: Dolls, Pretend Play, and (again) Dolls. Toys in the left aisles showed images of boys on the boxes, drilling, shooting […]

Imagine you’re a pedestrian at a busy traffic intersection. Some of the roads are major highways, some are smaller, local streets, but in order to cross safely you must pay attention to all of them. Now imagine you are a driver on one of those roads. You obviously pay attention to what’s going on around […]