I know writing this is going to generate some not-so-nice comments, so let’s just get it out of the way: I’m a beige mom. I do not want my house covered in fire-engine red, electric blue, highlighter yellow, and that particular shade of green apparently reserved exclusively for children’s plastic toys. I don’t understand why becoming a mother was supposed to mean surrendering every room of my house to something that looks like a preschool classroom circa 1997. And before anyone starts typing furiously: My children are fine. Actually, they’re more than fine. They’re spoiled rotten.
I’m a mom of two: a four-year-old girl and an almost three-month-old baby. We have toys. So many toys. We have colorful toys, too. I simply don’t want every single thing my children touch to look like a rainbow threw up on it. Which is why I have a bone to pick with Little Tikes.
Of course, now that my daughter is four and I have already purchased virtually every toy a small child could possibly require, Little Tikes decides to release its gorgeous “Cloud” line. White. Beige. Soft, muted colors. Where were you people four years ago?
When my daughter was younger, finding a basketball hoop or play structure that didn’t come in Ronald McDonald colors was practically an archaeological expedition. And when you did find one? Prepare to refinance your house. Parents who have gone searching for “aesthetic” toys know exactly what I’m talking about.
Take children’s brand Smol, which bills itself as “a fun company with good taste.” Its products are beautiful. Slides, sensory tables, and a basketball hoop that won’t make your living room look like a Chuck E. Cheese. There’s just one small problem: A chic basketball hoop can run you around $200.
Would I ever spend that much money on a white basketball hoop just because it was aesthetically pleasing? Absolutely not. Did I put it in my cart multiple times? Absolutely.
Thankfully, somewhere between “add to cart” and “check out,” the functioning portion of my brain would wake up, smack some sense into me, and remind me that I was contemplating spending hundreds of dollars so my toddler could miss baskets in a more aesthetically pleasing environment. I resisted.
And now Little Tikes strolls in years later with a beige-and-white basketball hoop for around $35. That’s less than a quarter of the price of the luxury baby items I stared at for years.
What took so long? To be clear, this isn’t a hit on Little Tikes. Quite the opposite; I love Little Tikes. Its stuff lasts forever. I love the look of those gorgeous wooden outdoor toys as much as anyone, but plastic wins outside. It survives rain, mud, toddlers, forgotten juice cups, winters, and whatever unidentified substance your child has smeared across it. Hose it down and move on with your life.
Little Tikes just needed better colors, and I told it as much for approximately four years. I emailed the company multiple times asking some version of: When are you going to make white and beige toys? Or at least give us colors that don’t assault the eyeballs? Give me a light pink. A sage green. A soft blue. Anything.
Every time, I’d get a polite response along the lines of, “Thank you, we’ll take that into consideration.” Well, apparently the company did. It only took four years. You’re welcome, America.
But here’s the part of the beige-mom debate that drives me crazy: Somewhere along the way, not wanting a neon orange slide in your family room became evidence that you’re depriving your children of a childhood. I’m not a bad mom because I don’t like obnoxiously colored toys. My daughter has colorful things. I just prefer those things to have a home when we’re done playing with them. If a toy is going to permanently live in my family room, kitchen, or backyard, yes, I’d rather it not scream “DAYCARE” from across the street.
And that’s not just about being picky. Not every family has a designated playroom where they can close the door on the Fisher-Price explosion. Plenty of parents live in apartments, city homes, townhouses, or smaller houses where the living room is also the playroom. Why shouldn’t they be able to buy a play kitchen or basketball hoop that can sit in the corner without taking over the entire room? If I want to invite my girlfriends over last-minute, I don’t want to perform an emergency evacuation of every toy my children own. A little beige camouflage goes a long way.
And no, I don’t buy the argument that my daughter’s imagination is somehow suffering because her toys aren’t fluorescent. My child could entertain herself with three sticks, a tissue, and a rock. Her imagination has always amazed me. I bought her a dollhouse (the black and white one from Joanna Gaines’ Hearth & Hand line at Target) when she was about one, and by two years old, she was creating elaborate little scenes that made me wonder what exactly was happening inside that tiny head. She’d position everyone, invent relationships, create stories, and keep herself occupied forever.
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We also never relied on screens to entertain her, and I’m incredibly thankful for that now. She learned how to be bored and then figure out how not to be bored. She can entertain herself. She can sit nicely at a restaurant. She can turn practically anything around her into a game. None of that required a neon green plastic table.
I’m not trying to raise beige children. I’m not banning color. I’m not standing over my daughter with a Sherwin-Williams swatch and confiscating anything above a certain saturation level. I just don’t understand why children’s toys spent decades operating under the assumption that kids can only experience joy when an object contains every color of the rainbow simultaneously.
Children bring enough chaos into a house on their own. There are Goldfish crumbs in places that defy physics. Someone or something is always sticky. If I can make even a small portion of that chaos sage green instead of radioactive lime? I’m going to.
And apparently a lot of other parents feel the same way. For years, “aesthetic” children’s toys were treated like a weird luxury niche. If you wanted something in softer colors, you had to hunt for it, pay more for it, or accept that the primary-colored version was your only reasonable option. That’s changing. Mainstream toy companies are finally giving parents something incredibly simple: choices. And that’s all I ever wanted.
If you love the classic red, yellow, and blue toys, buy them. Fill your house with them. Build a primary-colored kingdom. Your kid will have a blast. But so is mine with whites, dusty pinks and sage greens. My daughter isn’t experiencing some color-deprived childhood because Mommy prefers neutrals. She has imagination. She has creativity. She has plenty of color.
She also has grandparents. Trust me, she’s getting enough neon.
So yes, I’m a beige mom. Get over it.
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