I work at a daycare.

Most days I mindlessly pick up toys, wipe them down with sickeningly-scented sanitizing wipes, and put them back on their shelves. This, and diaper changing, is the dirty work of the daycare world.

Today, I was going about the usual business when I came across a baby doll. Mind you, all of our baby dolls are female. As if women were the only humans to start off as babies. This realization saddened me, for it not only deprived those that played with the babies (a toy used to simulate future life) of realism, but it deprived the boys of a reflection of themselves, and a chance to develop for their future. The toddler girls recognize themselves in the toys, baby girls, choosing to care for baby girls, and they learn their first lessons in nurturing. Baby boys are taught the babies are only for the girls, because only baby-doll girls exist in their world, and they miss out on first lessons in care.

Additionally, I was stopped in my tracks, because not only did I realize that gender roles were being enforced to toddlers in a very innocent-seeming way, but beauty standards were as well. The baby doll, let me repeat, BABY doll had on makeup. Lipstick, chipping away from months of play, eyeliner, mascara stained its painted face. This pretend infant (again, a toy meant to simulate real life) was teaching toddler girls that this is what baby girls are supposed to look like. Babies cannot wear makeup. Babies don’t need makeup to be cute. The only purpose I see for it was to establish that the baby was, indeed, a girl, and that it was a thing only girls should play with.

I asked my boss if we could buy new baby dolls.

My coworker told me I got upset about something that wasn’t a big deal. Okay, maybe a few baby dolls aren’t a big deal, but little things add up. The girls will be fed hundreds of times besides this that they need to change themselves to be acceptable and beautiful. The boys will be fed thousands of times that nurturing behaviors are not for them–caring for their kin is not for them. So, this one instance might not be a big deal, but giving them one less instance of harmful influence is a big deal…to me…and considering that these harmful standards have hurt most of us, it should be a big deal to you too.