ethnicity of dolls - do your children notice?

[meemee]

do your children notice if their dolls look similar to them or like friends.

i have noticed that interestingly my dd doesnt really notice the ethnicity of her dolls. she is lucky to have all different kinds, even v. asian dolls in asian clothes from korea, pakistan and arab nation. dd has tan skin.

she loves, loves, loves babies whose eyes moves or dolls with golden hair - hers is dark brown.

when she was 2 years old i got some keyrings of kids figurines. she noticed one was blue eyed gold haired like her friend and another red haired like her other friend. she saw they looked similar to her friends and gave them the keyrings.

now she does not have any one favourite dolls. seh loves them all. i dont think she has noticed their ethnicity. she is 7 now and prefers puppies more now.

do your chldren notice the ethnicity of their dolls. how do they notice ethnicity.

in fact if anything - my dd noticed the enthnicity when she talked about where her friends or friends gparents came from. how if you are from africa you would have a shade of brown skin that could be light or v. v. dark.

dd and i live in a v. diverse city in the US.

[MusicianDad]

DD's never really spent much time noticing ethnicity of anyone... But she did comment once upon a time when seeing an Asian doll that it didn't really look Asian in the sense of what Asian people really looked like, but did in the sense of what white people seem to think Asian people look like if that makes any sense. Mostly I just chalked it up to DD and DH being part Japanese.

[Belle]

Our daughters have dolls that are few different races. They don't notice at all. A baby is a baby, no matter what color its skin is. They also have friends and neighbors of all different races so I guess they're used to it.

[MadiMamacita]

i had a day care in Peru where all the kids were varying shades of brown. I went to great lengths to find dolls that were not just blond. the result? no one ever wanted to play with the brown dolls and fought over the blond dolls.

[SeekingSerenity]

My DS has a "lovey" which is actually a Cabbage Patch doll with a plush body, designed to look like she's dressed as a Christmas tree. Anyway, her skin is dark - she's actually meant to be an African-American doll. DS (as are all 3 of my youngest) is half-Hispanic, so he's darker skinned than me, yet lighter than his father. He has never seemed to notice that "Sarah," his beloved dollie, is supposedly of a different race.

He has, however, noticed that other people, such as those he sees in public places, are of different appearance, and therefore must be "from different places." He tends to associate these differences with TV shows he's seen such as "Ni Hao, Kai Lan" on Noggin/Nick Jr. (whatever they're calling it these days). For instance, he's mentioned that his doll Sarah has dark skin like the singer, Raven. He also likes to say his skin is the same color as hers (he's in love with anything musical, and female to boot).

[frugalmama]

my dd did notice but wasn't really big on it other than her favorite doll "looks like me" according to her.

[Sierra]

I believe children notice, whether or not we know it.

See:
http://www.antiracistparent.com/2009...-black-barbie/

But most especially the video linked there, which is only a couple years old:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqSFqnUFOns

It really calls to question whether light-skinned kids anyway, who say they prefer a doll because it looks like them actually do, are actually responding more to a culturally engrained notion norm.

There was some research done a while back, and I am sorry I can cite it because I don't recall who did it when, but basically what happened was this...

Parents of very young school children were given either (1) red shirts or (2) blue shirts for the children. They were instructed to dress these children in the shirts for a period (a week?). No one talked about it. No one treated the children differently (unlike the old classic blue eye/brown eye class-based "experiment"). They just had the kids wear the shirts. At the end of period, they interviewed the kids. The children had self-selected alliances with other children wearing the same color shirt they were. They reported that they believed that children wearing the same color shirt were "nice" across the board, and that only some children wearing the other color shirt were "nice."

The idea being that kids notice differences, even if no one notices them noticing and even if no one talks about it.

I think that latter research might be discussed in the book Nurture Shock, a book about the way popular parenting ideas conflict with research. One such myth is that we create "color blind" children by not talking about race. In fact, not talking about race is actually problematic in several ways, but that is a bit of a tangent.

So anyway, I think kids notice, in general.

[WC_hapamama]

My kids have noticed that their dolls/figurines come in different colors, but they don't remember seem to care much.

My kids (as well as myself) are biracial, so that may have something to do with it too.

On a similar topic, my kids have 3 very typically Asian looking grandparents, and then my red-haired, blue-eyed with freckles father. For my kids, my dad is just "Granddaddy", and it took them a while to ask "Why does Granddad have red hair?".

[mamazee]

I think kids notice regardless of whether we think they do. There's a good article about this at Nurtureshock.

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtu...too-young.aspx

[MaterPrimaePuellae]

Yes. My DD got a beautiful Berengeur (sp?) doll with very dark skin/eyes when she was about 2. "Baby Gail" is the most life-like looking of our babies (and we have... about 30 ), and perhaps that is part of the reason why DD commented about her appearance from the beginning. People seem to think it is hilarious to see my blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter toting baby Gail around , and we get a lot of comments about her.

I find it kindof hard to believe that children don't "notice" ethnicity. My DD notices which babies have blue eyes, which have green... she's certainly going to notice that most of her babies are cream colored and one is the color of dark chocolate. I certainly have not noticed any preference though. She picked out a brown baby from a pile of mini-babies are Target a few months ago, though there were plenty who looked more like her.

There was a show on This American Life a few years ago about a clerk who worked in the "nursery" at FAO Schwartz (or however that's spelled) and how they had all the AA babies left at the end of the season... and the last family who came in to buy a baby wanted to buy the crazy looking, broken, red-haired display model instead of the perfectly good AA babies. Crazy.

[AbbieB]

I heard that particular This American Life. I was shocked and amazed at that last parent who would not even consider the black dolls. Such a sad example of where we are at with race issues in our culture.

Last year, DD picked out 2 mermaid dolls from a big bin at our aquarium's gift shop. She choose one with dark skin because it looked like Dora the Explorer. She choose the lighter skin mermaid because she had lots of pink hair and pink sparkles on her tail.

DD has a birthday coming up and she wants more Barbies. I just asked her if she wants to get a Barbie with black or brown skin and her face just lit up and she definitely wants one (or 20).

DD has had many friends with different skin tones. Her best friends when she was little were Asian and black. Her good friend now is Hispanic. Come to think of it, DD has never had a white best friend. FWIW, DD is white with blond hair and blue eyes.

I know DD notices skin color, but I don't think it is that big a deal to her. We have had conversations about racism (unfortunately it has come up in real life. ) No doubt we will continue to.

[Belle]

Originally Posted by MaterPrimaePuellae

There was a show on This American Life a few years ago about a clerk who worked in the "nursery" at FAO Schwartz (or however that's spelled) and how they had all the AA babies left at the end of the season... and the last family who came in to buy a baby wanted to buy the crazy looking, broken, red-haired display model instead of the perfectly good AA babies. Crazy.

But that was probably the parents who chose the broken baby over the perfectly good AA babies in the mistaken belief that kids would want babies with matching skin tones.

My oldest isn't into dolls much but my nearly two year old won't go to sleep without a baby with her. She has an assortment of different dolls. She doesn't seem to have a preference for the red headed doll over the AA one. (she has red hair) but she loves the dollar tree one that's bairly holding together. I think we need to pick up another of those.

[mamatoablessing]

My kids don't have a lot of dolls, so it really hasn't been something I've thought about.

But, I have a story from my childhood; I was probably in 3rd grade or so. Do you remember when the Cabbage Patch Kid Dolls were REALLY big? I mean, parents were waiting in lines for hours to get these dolls and people were fighting for them when they were on the shelves and no store could keep them in stock for more than a couple of hours.

Anyway, I just had to have a CPK. My mom went everywhere looking for them and even stood in line a few times with no success. Finally she found a store that had some in stock and she came home with a black CPK for me. She said I never blinked an eye on the color. I don't recall ever thinking that the doll was any different from any of my other dolls. It was a doll and a CPK and I loved it. So, then my brother wanted one (he's a couple of years younger than me) and my mom was able to track down one for him too. It was a hispanic CPK. Just like with me, I don't think he really noticed and he certainly didn't care about the color. I still have both of those dolls and when the girls are a little older, I'll probably give the CPK to them.

[boheime]

My kids don't seem to notice or care, but they also don't seem to notice or care that their friends have different colors of skin. It's just a variation of human to them - just like hair or eye color.

[Elecampane]

My DD (3) has a doll obsession. Like, she probably has fifty or so dolls. All shapes, sizes, and colors. She names them all descriptively, so we have "Chinese baby", "brown baby", "mad baby", "laughing baby", etc. I'm not too sure how she came up with the adjectives describing ethnicity, but to her it's just a way of identifying them. So, she does notice, but she doesn't care. I do remember she was enthralled with an AA doll's "bumpy" molded hair when we got it but that was it. I wouldn't say she prefers dolls that look like her--she has rotating favorites that she carries around with her. (We are white btw.)

[Pepper44]

My DD never noticed or commented on differences in race until she watched a Black History Month episode of Little Bill on Noggin/Nick Jr. Then it she started loudly pointing out black people in stores, innocently, but still it turned heads and made for a few awkward moments. (This was last year when she was 2 years old.)

She has a few dolls, and they all happen to be white. If she had a larger collection of dolls I'm sure it would be expanded to include different races! Maybe it's just where we live, but the three or four times DD has picked out a doll from the store they have mainly had only white dolls. I've never seen an Asian doll or a Hispanic doll, and just a few African American ones. From the $1 bin at Target, all the dolls were white. Same with the plush dolls at the Dollar Tree, and the little bin of $2 dolls at the grocery store.

[mamazee]

I'm only copying a very small part of this article, because of copyright issues, but this is written by a dad who assumed his daughter hadn't noticed race much if at all, and hadn't paid any attention to the fact that her favorite baby doll was black.

So I started with her baby dolls, as Bigler recommended. That night, as Thia played with her babies, I remarked that it was good she liked baby dolls with all kinds of skin color. I couldn’t get myself to say “brown skin,” but Thia practically leapt at the overture. She grabbed her brown-skinned baby doll and started talking about its brown skin, and how her doll's brown skin was like her friends' at school. Bigler was absolutely right. My daughter did want to talk about it. I felt something akin to relief in her─that her father had finally let her openly talk about skin color.

Here's the whole article. http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtu...too-young.aspx

[rightkindofme]

Yes. She notices. My 16 month old daughter will paw through a pile of dolls of many hues to get to the one white, blond, blue-eyed doll. This is something I have very uncomfortable feelings about as my kid looks like the poster child for an Aryan Nation. Maybe she is doing it because she wants the doll that looks like her (maybe? Do they do that this young?) or maybe she just has a visual preference already. I'm trying to introduce dolls of different ethnicities because I think it is for the best to not isolate her in a white world. She has lots of board books with multi-racial children (it has taken some searching) because I don't want her to think that everyone in the world looks like her. So far... the doll issue weighs on my mind. I don't know what to do about it. Should I just get dolls of other races and not ask about her preferences? It's... sticky.

[Girlprof]

I think kids notice. Even if we don't know it, they probably notice. I have been more active on this issue with gender. The majority of my DS's stuffed animals are girls - that's because we decided that early on when he was a little baby. You know what's weird? His most favorite doggy is clearly a mommy dog. She has a baby dog attached to her. Yet other adults almost invariably refer to her as "he".

I am going to go back and read that article for some ideas about how to raise this issue.

[mamazee]

Originally Posted by Girlprof

I think kids notice. Even if we don't know it, they probably notice. I have been more active on this issue with gender. The majority of my DS's stuffed animals are girls - that's because we decided that early on when he was a little baby. You know what's weird? His most favorite doggy is clearly a mommy dog. She has a baby dog attached to her. Yet other adults almost invariably refer to her as "he".

I am going to go back and read that article for some ideas about how to raise this issue.

Yes, we had a kangaroo with a joey in her pouch, and people would always ask what HIS name was. Male is the default with stuffed animals, it seems.