Milasarus-Rex | My Dinosaur Queen & Gender Stereotypes In Today's Time

If you've followed us for any length of time on social media then you know that our little princess is obsessed with everything dinosaurs! We're not sure where it came from or what sparked it but she just can't get enough of them. She spends her youtube time watching videos of dinosaurs and sits in her room for hours just playing pretend with the millions of dinosaurs she has in there.

She always gets so excited when I find her a shirt or a dress adorned with dinos, and gets a little upset when some of the things we find say "only boys". The happened to us more than once when we were looking for things to put in her room. It's hard to explain to a 3-year old that we can't hang a 'boys only' dinosaur footprint in her room, so she had a mini-meltdown at Hobby Lobby.

I never realized how gendered dinosaurs were until Mila, and it made me wonder who decided that only little boys could ever like dinosaurs? Mila can name 7 dinosaurs, and often likes to pretend she is a dinosaur. Her favorite movies to watch right now are the Jurassic Park & World movies so when they came out with merchandise in the Target stores not only for boys but for girls too I knew that times were definitely changing.

If you look at the hashtag on Instagram #GirlsLikeDinosaursToo you can see everything from little girls that love dinosaurs just as much as Mila does, to small shops run by moms who started filling the gap for things that are made for little girls that have dinosaurs on it. It warmed my heart when I saw that there was a community built around it and that I wasn't the only one that noticed Dinosaurs were marketed for boys and not for girls.

I don't see how little girls could have fed into their Dinosaur obsessions a couple years ago without being called tomboys, or maybe if I was an older parent I would have tried to give Mila baby dolls and barbies. We do often get comments on how 'cool' it is that Mila doesn't like what other 'normal' little girls like. Which always rubs me the wrong way because everyone's definition of normal is completely different. 

On the flip side if my little brother loved barbies and baby dolls the reaction from my family probably wouldn't have been as supportive or as positive as the one Mila got with her dinosaurs.  If Mila was a boy and liked barbies and baby dolls I don't even think Jeff would be ok with it. Gender roles and stereotypes are so ingrained not only in our cultures but in our society that I feel like it's still going to be a couple of years until we see or even notice a big shift.

Do you think it's fair that toys are heavily gendered?