It started with my daughter. She was three, and we were shopping for new bedding after she moved into her first big girl bed. She loved ballet and painting sparkles—and she also loved space. But when we went looking for something that reflected all of her, the options felt incredibly narrow. Everything in the girls’ aisle was soft, pastel, and pretty. Butterflies, cupcakes, princesses. Sweetness on display. That was the story being told.

Across the aisle, it was all action. Dinosaurs. Rockets. Fire trucks. Motion, power, noise. The boys’ section was packed with adventure and daring. The message was clear: girls are here to be beautiful and nurturing. Boys are here to explore and conquer.

I couldn’t stop seeing it after that. It was everywhere—on T-shirts, in books, in the colors and language we use without thinking. “Daddy’s little angel.” “Little troublemaker.” And always, always, the assumption that adventure belongs to boys, and care belongs to girls.

Years later, when my son was two, he began pushing his sister’s hot pink doll stroller to school every morning. He loved wheels and firefighters and everything rough and fast. But he also loved gently rocking his teddy bear in that stroller. It gave him something his trucks never could: a place to nurture.

For a while, that stroller went everywhere with him. I still remember the sight of him—firefighter hat askew, carefully tucking his stuffed animals inside. There was something quietly powerful in that moment, something that stayed with me. It made me realize how little space we give boys to be soft. How rarely we see nurture as strength.

Musya saw it too. When her son Judah turned two, I gifted him a doll stroller. She was skeptical at first. Judah was wild and physical and loud. But then something shifted. He started using it for his trains and stuffed animals. He rammed it into walls, sure. But he also began rocking Elmo. He started bringing the stroller to the park. And then the other boys started bringing their sisters’ doll strollers too.

Judah didn’t become less brave or less bold. He just became more whole.

Musya and I started having conversations—at school, in parks, in airport lines. Why don’t boys have doll strollers? The answers were always the same: “I don’t want him to be soft.” “That’s not really for boys.” But what we were really hearing was this: we don’t value nurture. We don’t see it as powerful. We don’t want our sons associated with it.

That’s what we set out to change.

Hart and Hero didn’t start with a product. It started with a question. What would happen if we gave our kids permission to be all of themselves? If we told our sons that nurture is not a weakness—and told our daughters that adventure isn’t reserved for someone else?

We saw it happen with our kids. We saw how something as simple as a doll stroller could create space for both tenderness and strength. And we realized: it’s not just about the toys. It’s about the messages we’re giving, often without even realizing it.

We launched Heart and Hero to widen the aisle. To give kids—not just girls or boys, but kids—the space to be brave and kind and loud and gentle. To remind ourselves that raising whole humans starts with the smallest things.

And to remember: the stories we tell in childhood shape the ones we live as adults.