Today, on the the World Children’s Day, COFACE Families Europe is launching  “Toy stories”, the first Europe-wide survey on Toys and Diversity, highlighting the need to give children the space to play for full creativity, imagination, learning development and fun.

COFACE Families Europe is a pluralistic network of civil society associations representing the interests of all families. Each child is born without stereotypes and predefined (gender) roles. But early in life, cultural and societal norms play an important role in the assignment of stereotypes, and we have taken closer look at the impact of toy production and marketing on making and breaking stereotypes. With just a month left before Christmas, COFACE Families Europe is launching a survey in 13 languages to better understand what influences family and friends when buying toys.

Since three years COFACE has been running awareness campaigns to ipromote equal opportunities and to highlight gender, disability and racial stereotypes in toy production, marketing and shops. This survey builds on COFACE’s good work and aims to further consolidate our understanding as to what influences families’ toys buying habits by hearing personal stories. The survey will be open until Christmas and we encourage you to share it with your friends and family. We are looking forward to hearing your toy stories from across Europe and plan to publish the results early 2020.

At Eurodiaconia, we activelely promote children inclusion and development as part of creating a Social Europe which allows all individuals to fully realise themselves. This is why we recently signed a joint call to action to European Union Member States for an Investing in Children Council Recommendation by the Alliance for investing in children. This is part of our larger commitment to equality and ensuring that national social policy variations are not a barrier to the full development of children into active adults.

 

 

Please take five minutes of your time by answering COFACE’s survey availble online.

If you would like to read our joint call for action, please visit our partner’s website.