Legos weren’t a particularly meaningful part of my childhood. I liked imaginative play and building things, but most of what I recall from early childhood is the outdoor play — climbing trees, playing freeze tag, collecting bugs in a jar, playing sports, and going on adventures in the yards of friends and neighbors.

My husband, on the other hand, was a Lego fanatic. Years ago, when his mom moved out of the home where he grew up, she gifted us several large boxes of his original Legos, some of which were still constructed as he had left them decades ago! I didn’t think much of it — my oldest daughter had just turned 5 and hadn’t yet ventured into the world of Legos and all their tiny parts.

Then came the Frozen Lego set, and everything changed. On Christmas day, my daughter sat down with her dad, and together they built the whole thing. The next day, she took it apart and built it again by herself. She proceeded to do this again and again until, finally, we realized what a gold mine we had sitting in our basement. My husband brought up his old Legos.

I admit, I wondered if they would have the same allure. The Frozen set was character driven and in all pastels and white. His Legos were old school yellow, green, red, and blue. His Lego minifigures were knights, policemen, firemen, construction workers, astronauts, and, oh yes, a lone female who was a queen. Yet, the primary colors and the lack of female minifigures didn’t matter one bit. My daughter rolled up her sleeves and was in heaven for weeks on end, building and taking apart towns and houses and stores, creating storyline after storyline.

Gradually, she noticed more of the Lego Friends sets at stores and at her friends’ houses and asked for some of those. While I normally roll my eyes at companies that throw pink at any given toy to try and make it more appealing for girls, at this point, I really didn’t care because I loved how intently she worked building with Legos. And, to my delight, she actually integrated the Lego Friends in their purple mini skirts right into the old school worlds she continued to create with her dad’s old Legos. It didn’t even seem to occur to her that the old Legos might be “boyish.”

It all changed for me when I came across a suspicious column in an issue of the Lego Friends magazine. There was a section called “Emma’s beauty tips,” featuring Lego “Friend” Emma, who proclaimed that little girls with square-shaped faces can get a haircut to “soften the edges of your face,” while the longer-faced girls can get a haircut to “help your face appear slightly shorter.” Um, what? Is the Lego company really wasting trees to print magazines for children ages 5-12 on how they can compensate for their apparently wrong-shaped faces? What’s next, a column for the same age group on how to choose swimsuits to accommodate their short torsos or too-curvy backsides?

I emailed Lego and unleashed a bit of my wrath. We have spent enough money on Legos in this house and, frankly, I felt I deserved an explanation. Within a day, I received the following reply:

We’re sorry you’re not completely satisfied with the content of the recent LEGO® Club Magazine.

The LEGO Club team is always looking for new ways to engage fans based on feedback we get. One thing readers asked us to include was an “Advice Column.” We attempted to do this by expanding on a current LEGO Friends story line.

Your feedback is valuable and valid, and has already been shared with the LEGO Club team in order to have a positive impact on future content. We want our members to be happy with the LEGO Club, so it’s important that we listen to members and their families!

Please let us know if you need anything else.

Kind regards,

Andrew
LEGO® Service

So, there’s a Lego friends storyline about girls critiquing the shapes of their faces? I wrote back and basically said that their excuse was a poor one at best.

Honestly, I wish I could say that they’ll never see another dime of mine but it isn’t that simple. The problem is that I like their product and how my daughter thinks and creates with their product. I’m disappointed in them for this blunder. I’m actually stunned that presumably a group of people all approved this column without even one person thinking that it might not go over well. But in the end, the positives for Lego are too good to just drop. And really, there is no other product out there quite like Lego.

Instead, this becomes another thing we will talk about with my daughter in ways that make sense for her age and hopefully, she will come to see how utterly clueless some companies can be, even if they are hugely successfully. It is a similar approach that we already take when it comes to some movies, TV shows, and songs.

I can’t keep her from being exposed to things that make me cringe as a woman but part of my job is to help open her eyes to the messages the world tries to send about girls and women and address it in a way that a 5-year-old gets. Girls can’t play sports? Girls can’t do math? Girls have to look a certain way? Girls can’t be president? Man, those are some silly messages!

We know those things aren’t true! Sure, the talks will change and get more complex as she ages, but for now, it’s all we can do in the face of people who think 6-yea- old girls should be thinking about whether they actually have the right-shaped face.