— A new building toy that is specifically meant to teach children about racial diversity among families and to be more representative of various family makeups has the team at Click-A-Brick nodding in approval.
MyFamilyBuilders is a building set that contains 48 wooden pieces that consist of heads, torsos and lower bodies that can snap together to form various combinations of people. The set is meant for children to be able to create families that look like their own, but also to consider how other families may have different makeups than the traditional families usually represented in toys.
Created by Ez Karpf, the toy was developed out of frustration at the lack of diversity prevalent in other toys. Karpf saw this first hand while shopping for a toy for his friend’s daughter. He wanted to buy a toy that reflected her multi-racial family, but could not find any.
“I assumed you’d find toys for all sorts of families,” Karpf said. “90 percent of the time, you find a family in a toy set that is one mom, one dad, one girl, one boy. Sometimes there is an African American box or Asian box.”
However, there is a distinct lack of less traditional families represented in toys like families with same-gender parents or parents of different ethnic backgrounds. With MyFamilyBuilders, children can create their own interpretations of what a family looks like and can build a family that looks like their own if they are part of a multi-racial family.
Karpf developed the toy, for kids aged three to seven, together with his business partners, which include a child psychologist and an education specialist. They come with a set of cards that are meant to help educate children about different types of families.
Currently, Karpf is seeking backers on Kickstarter for MyFamilyBuilders and plans to sell directly to consumers and also partner with psychologists and education specialist to use the toys in their practices.
Click-A-Brick Co-Founders Jason Smith and Georg de Gorostiza say they like the different take on both building toys and educational toys that MyFamilyBuilders offers.
“We’ve seen several different toys introduced recently that address the lack of diversity in the toy aisle, but most of them do it on an individual basis,” Smith said. “The beauty of MyFamilyBuilders is that it gets kids to look at diversity from the perspective of a family unit and it educates them about diversity within family units. Although our own toy teaches children skills related to the science, technology, engineering and math fields, which is hugely popular right now, we appreciate any toy that is educational in nature and learning about diversity and the different family makeups is just as important for kids as learning about science or engineering.”
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