gfrancie | parenting drivel

I recently read some blog post where a Mother had concerns about her daughter playing with Barbie. Her kid is three, she let her have a barbie from the thrift store and she felt really uncomfortable because she dislikes Barbie and all that it is associated with it. She has concerns about things like body dysmorphia and so on. (blah-di-blah blah women's studies stuff) She wanted advice on finding some more body-friendly dolls and so on.

When I was a kid, my Mom had some initial concerns about me having a Barbie as well. I saved my pennies and bought Peaches'n'Cream Barbie. Btw, she was one of the most awesome Barbies ever in the history of Barbie. Don't argue with me. I am right. I have several witnesses who can back me up on this hard fact. Once I had my Barbie and I also began to collect clothes for her. It was observing me playing with Barbie; my Mother remembered what she had loved about her own Barbies. It was fun to dress her up in her flashy trashy clothes. I didn't have a ton of Barbies; just a few different ones that I loved dressing up and giving them adventures (most of which involved them flying around the world to parties, running their salon, going to the Ghostbuster house for bbqs and occasionally getting into fights with one another over who would wear which fabulous outfit to the party in Paris. Important stuff y'all) I lacked a Ken, so there weren't a lot of sex parties unless I went to my friend Annie's house as she had a couple of Kens. I had a Pacific Islander/Hawaiian Barbie and a Midge. I think it was a nice variety. A little something for everyone. I also had some terrific cloth dolls my Mother had made for me and a couple of store-bought ones. I enjoyed playing with all of them. (I also lusted after the American Girl Dolls but we were too poor to afford them.) I also liked playing with trucks, lego and my brother's toys. (Both of my brothers also had a variety of dolls. One of my brothers had a couple of baby dolls that he was incredibly protective of.) There really wasn't any limitation on what we could and could not play with. No gender divide or judgment about what we played with. I think that was incredibly important. Kids really don't need a lot of dogma when it comes to play -no matter how politically correct it is. Most kids just want to play. Some are partial to dollies and some are not. No point in trying to sway them either way because really you enter into some much more dangerous territory which later on which I will get into.
As for the whole idea of gender dysmorphia I kind of want to laugh. Girls in particular are more likely to get that stuff from family. Usually it comes in the form of people making pointed comments about their looks or their weight. (you would be so much prettier if you just lost a few pounds. You shouldn't eat dessert, you are getting to be a big girl.) Girls also pick it up from observing their own Mothers slagging themselves off or constantly bemoaning their weight. Kids learn that behavior over time. Girls develop quite a few body issues when going through puberty. Some of it is related to what they experience in school, some of it is just the lack of education many have about regarding what is going on with their bodies and often times a parent might not help this. (It is pretty common to gain a fair amount of weight when you are going through puberty and I saw a number of girls being told by their Mothers that they needed to go on a diet. So much diet yogurt was eaten in junior high. Really their parents should have read a few health books instead.) It isn't Barbie that does this. It is mostly well-meaning but clueless people who close to a kid.
Going back to the the limitations of what a kid can and can't play with, I do worry that when you say, "no not for you" because you are a boy/girl or you have your own political agenda that you are going to make a minor situation escalate into something huge. It could leave a more profound emotional impact than letting the kid have a Barbie. You don't have to give a kid every toy they want, but if they really enjoy playing Barbie and they like being a Princess for awhile or just play with GI Joe and trucks, the phase might not last as long if you don't make it a forbidden pleasure. It isn't like it will make a kid gay or end up some insipid creature with no sense of self.

My kid adores these three little cars that he owns. He even sleeps with them. He also adores an old doll of mine called Ginny. She wears a fancy dress, has gold shoes and pretty blonde hair. She also sleeps next to him. I am not too worried about Senor Onion. He loves a lot of things. (I trip on so much damn lego) He is very tender with his dolls and stuffed animals. He puts them all to bed each night and makes sure they are covered up with blankets. I am mostly observing a kid who likes to take gentle care of creatures and that isn't a bad lesson to learn.

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This is my take on that sort of issue: I had a bunch of Barbies and various accessories/playsets. Some of them were hand-me-downs from my sister, some were my own. And I never felt any sort of pressure, from the dolls themselves or from the advertising, that she was any sort of ideal that I HAD to live up to. Barbies were just blank slates upon which to create all sorts of outrageous soap-opera-esque stories. Hell, more often I was interested in the little playsets with all their accessories than the dolls themselves.

And for the record, my favorite was a Native American one - she was part of that special [insert country/ethnicity] Princess line they had when I was a kid, with Barbies from various countries/time periods. I think she might have been specifically Navajo or some other Southwestern tribe, but I'm not sure. But she had lovely dark hair and brown skin and a nifty white fringed outfit and I thought she was just the bees' knees, probably in part because she looked so different from the other dolls.

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