We Believe in Girls blog tour

Imagine my surprise when I was invited to participate in a Mattel blog tour! Turns out the corporate father of Barbie (that's right, the doll) just launched a new site for girls of all ages called We Believe in Girls. Got an opinion about what's happening to girls today, then post it in the "What do you believe" section, want to find out what Mattel is doing to empower girls check out "What's Happening." If you're wondering what this web site has to do with old family photos, take out your shoebox of pics and look for images of girls holding dolls. Barbie (love her or hate her) has been around for several generations. While every generation has their favorite doll, few have lasted as long as Barbie. As a Mom I'm grateful to Mattel for tackling a difficult issue. Parenting girls in an age of media stereotypes isn't easy. It's a lot of fun to click through the links on the site and read about what other women think, but my personal favorite is the timeline featuring Barbie meshed with historical events of the past fifty years. I know that Barbie is only middle-aged, but it would be great to see Mattel extend their timeline further into the past. Let's give girls some information about other earlier "empowered" females. The biography of the woman who invented Barbie presents a real-life role model for young girls. This woman had an idea and made it a reality. I'm not going to tell you her name. Go to the website and look it up. This summer I have a sixteen year old intern working with me so naturally I encouraged her to take a look at the site and give her teenage thoughts. Erin also really liked the idea of the timeline, but didn't care for the pony-tailed Barbie icons (I thought they were fine). She spent a long time looking at reading the posts from people who love the doll and looking at the resource section. We Believe in Girls is still in it's infancy. Once people start adding more posts and begin chatting, it's bound to gain momentum.