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Oh, It’s Tuesday: The Tricky Question of Dolls
My daughter, Betty, has been throwing fits lately when I put her hair in two puffs. She cries and kicks and acts as if I’m torturing her. Part of me, wants to say, “You want to talk about painful kid? Try getting your hair pressed with an iron hotcomb, and having your mom slip and burn your ear! Until you’ve had hot grease sizzling on your scalp, do not even try to act like I’m even halfway hurting you — which BTW, I’m not. You’re just tender-headed and acting a straight fool.”
Sadly, Betty only has a two-word vocabulary and isn’t quite ready for the tried and true method of comparing your old-timey childhood to your child’s relatively easy one. So I did some research, and the internets suggested modeling the activity on a doll, so that your child can be made to understand that it’s fun to not leave the house looking a hot mess.
Simple enough solution, but now here comes the question of what kind of doll to get. This is where being the mother of a biracial kid gets a bit tricky. My MIL purchased a stuffed white baby doll for her last Christmas, and I counterbalanced it with a stuffed black baby doll. Betty likes both dolls. She sleeps with the black one and plays with the white one in her playpen. However, this got me to wondering if I’d just have to buy her two dolls at every stage of the development game, one black and one white so that she doesn’t think that one is better than the other. Also, neither a black nor a white doll is great for the hair modeling business. I assume that this doll should at least look a little bit like her.
So I started putting some research into purchasing a biracial doll for Betty, and I found quite a few blog posts by frustrated moms of biracial daughters, looking for the same thing but only able to find pricey wonders like this $100 doll. And quite a few of these posts were from 2010. Sigh…
Got any thoughts, advice, or solutions? I could use the help.
why stop at two dolls? why can’t ms. b — i like the way that sounds — have dolls of every color and hue? honestly, i wouldn’t get too hung up on the dolls looking like your daughter until she starts asking for them and/or starts noticing differences. i got my girls American Girl Bitty Twins that sorta look like them. you get two dolls for about $100 and you can mix and match them. trouble is, they were so expensive I keep them in my room and the girls rarely play with them.
You know what’s funny is that your comment sparked off an idea. I always tell other writers that if they’re frustrated about not finding a certain kind of character in books, then they should write that book. If and when Betty asks about the severe lack of biracial dolls, then we’ll make one for her together!
oh, and she’s a cutie.
This website has a huge variety of dolls of different ethnicities (more single ethnicities rather than biracial, but you could interpret some as biracial), at different price points in different styles. Only catch is that many of them are 3+, so Betty as well as my babies will have to wait for most of them.
http://www.pattycakedoll.com
You could try searching for Black/African-American dolls; some of them have skin tones more similar to Betty’s.
Instead of hair that you can style (which tends to be less toddler-friendly), if you want to stick with the two puffs, you might consider a doll whose hair is permanently styled into two puffs. Then you can pretend to style the doll’s hair rather than actually doing it, and maybe Betty would want to match the doll.
I saw one fantastic line of dolls in a magazine, including one more similar to my own children’s ethnic mix, but I can’t find the info! I’ll let you know if I do.
I think 3+ will be fine, since it’s not going to be one of her carry-around dolls, just one we get out together to model certain activities. That site looks wonderful. I’ll let you know if I find anything.