Since 2016 when COFACE Families Europe published a European study of toy catalogues “Making or breaking stereotypes?”, we published 6 Toys & Diversity principles and have run a social media campaign on #ToysandDiversity as part of our work to promote equal opportunities and diversity. The campaign highlights gender, disability and racial stereotypes in toy production, catalogues and shops, and raises awareness among toy producers, advertisers, retailers and consumers about the need for toy diversity.
As every year in the pre-Christmas period, we trigger a social media campaign wave. 2016 was about stereotype hunting, 2017 year was about stereotype boycotting, 2018 provided checklists to think critically when buying toys. This year , on Universal Children’s Day, we have launched “Toy stories”, the first Europe-wide survey on #ToysandDiversity, highlighting the importance of letting children decide what to play with for their creativity, imagination, learning development and fun. This means not limiting children’s choices of which toys to play with by imposing on them predefined and stereotyped categories.
The survey will be open until Christmas and we encourage you to spread the survey to your friends and family! We are looking forward to collecting views from across Europe and plan to publish the results early 2020. In the meantime, you can follow the campaign on Twitter (#ToysAndDiversity), Facebook (Families Europe) and Instagram.
Click here to take the survey (available in BG, CZ, DE, EL, EN, ES, FI, FR, HR, IT, NL, SE).