A lot of kids movies/tv perpetuate harmful gender roles. The obvious culprit is Disney - and the ‘a woman’s role is to get married’ storylines. Even the later Disney movies seem to be embracing the message even while appearing to refute it.
But it’s larger than that. All the instances where a female character is only in a supporting role, or female characters have certain traits (empathy) but lack other traits (aggressiveness). Doing a gender swap and seeing the differences in how characters are portrayed has helped me see the double standards.
I’ve become more sensitive to this as I’m screening media for my young girls to watch.
A couple of the media that I’ve seen are the g rated Ghibli movies - Totoro and Kiki’s shows young girls that are independent, aggressive, courageous, and go through problems and overcome them.
I’m looking for some more examples of movies - g rated especially - in that vein.
Movies:
Trolls
We Can Be Heroes
Home
My Little Pony: A New Generation
Spy Kids
TV Shows:
Gabby’s Dollhouse
Star Trek: Prodigy
True and the Rainbow Kingdom
Puffin Rock
Spirit
Dragons Rescue Riders
She-Ra
Starbeam
Supa Team 4
You can’t have a list of kids TV shows without Bluey. Come on.
I haven’t watched it enough to know if it has healthy portrayal of gender.
Oh, it does.
It’s perhaps been a bit heteronormative so far, but the characters aren’t restrained to “traditional” gender roles.