Why I Was Wrong to Hate Barbie Dolls

Source: Photograph by Sandra Gabriel. Copyright free. Unsplash

When my daughter was born, 35 years ago, I was clear on a number of things; one of them was that she would never play with Barbie dolls. That wisp of a waist, the high-heeled feet, her symmetrical features and permanent lipstick, and the blondeness of her hair weren’t going to infiltrate my kid’s psyche with a vision of what a grown girl should look like.

What I wasn’t seeing was that my take on Barbie was precisely the take the feminists had on me in 1971, 17 years earlier, when I showed up at Barnard College to hear Kate Millett speak and participate in a group discussion. I was twenty-two and dressed in a mini-skirt, over-the-knee purple suede boots, and makeup. (And, yes, I was wearing a bra, unlike almost everyone else in the room.) I was effectively booted out after being told I was a pawn of the patriarchy and dressing “for men.”

I am too old to have played with Barbies myself; my dolls were designed by Madame Alexander and they embodied the 1950s gentility associated with little girls. They wore pleated skirts, dresses with little petticoats, and patent leather Mary Janes—precisely the clothes I was forced to wear as a child and which I loathed. When I played with my dolls, they climbed trees in those pleated skirts and collared blouses; they flew planes like my heroine Amelia Earhart even though the doll wardrobe didn’t include a single pair of pants, much less a flight jacket; or tinkered in a lab like Marie Curie; or played out scenes from my favorite books like Little House on the Prairie. Not surprisingly, they were tomboys like me, although they had a loving mother (me) which I did not.

Of course, as an overzealous, feminist mother, I had forgotten all of that.

The Barbie embargo didn’t work, of course; my daughter's father bought her one and that was pretty much that. But my daughter’s Barbies, despite their high-heeled feet, went on safari and explored space; when they were actually dressed—which wasn’t always because it was never about the clothes—they had jobs in publishing, were doctors, squabbled with their friends, and went swimming in our pool. They went on adventures and, to my knowledge, no single Barbie ever went on a date because she never wanted a Ken. They acted out unwritten scripts that only existed in my daughter’s head.

So, in a nutshell, she played with her Barbies just the way I had played with my Madame Alexanders, despite the fact that neither her dolls nor mine mirrored what real girls looked like or, more importantly, what each of us wanted to look like or be.

Why It’s Not About the Doll

Psychological research has long known that children’s pretend play—especially with dolls and toys—has enormous psychological and social benefits. It’s been theorized that this kind of play encourages understanding of how others think and feel, perspective-taking, and empathy, as well as improvements in executive function. Of course, much of the evidence was correlational, not causal.

Two experiments that measured brain activity using spectroscopy yielded more information recently. (Note that the results were published in peer-reviewed journals but the funds came from Mattel, Inc., the manufacturer of Barbies and other toys, although it had no influence on the findings.) The first study of 42 children, published in 2020, compared activity in a specific part of the brain when a child played alone, with either a doll or a tablet, or with a companion with either a doll or a tablet. The area of the brain associated with social processing and empathy was activated when playing with another child but when playing alone, there was more activity when a doll, not a tablet, was involved. If you visualize the interaction involved when a child plays with a doll—talking to it and having it talk back, for example—as opposed to solitary play on a tablet, this makes perfect sense.

A second study, published by the same team in 2021, showed that children used increased internal state language while playing with dolls, attributing states of mind and emotions to them and, once again, activating the part of the brain associated with empathy and social processing. (If you’ve ever played with dolls or watched a child play with one, you already know this, even though the term “internal state language” may be unfamiliar.) Interestingly, this was true of boys and girls but, as the researchers point out, this may not be generalizable since the boys involved were willing to play with dolls in an open setting.

The takeaway? It’s not about the doll but the play.

My apologies, Barbie. I was wrong. I did stick to my guns on sitcoms with canned laughter and my child never owned a video game, but the putative Barbie war was a rout. And, yes, we are going to the movie together.

Copyright © Peg Streep 2023