Barbierous

Many years ago, before I was smart, I dated a woman who was a sort of second aunt to a couple of kids. These kids – a boy and a girl – were the offspring of a friend of my girlfriend’s sister. At birthday time, the parents would have to vet the gifts kids were getting because they had a violent reaction to the standard gifts kids get. For the boy, nothing with guns, fictitious laser guns or otherwise. For the girls, no Barbies.

No mention was made as to whether the girl could get guns.

It was explained to me in no uncertain terms by my hyper-liberal girlfriend that Barbies were about as bad as toys can get, with the vomitous pink and purple palette and the unrealistic physical ideal that all girls are shown they have to live up to.

I asked if that meant that every girl who gets Barbies wants to be less than a foot tall, but questions were not allowed. This was the Way It Should Be.

Moving forward several years, and several relationship IQ points higher, as Kari and I got engaged and got married and got pregnant, I joked with her constantly that I was destined to have girls. I never knew how to talk to them (and remain a smartass no matter what gender I’m talking to), so I fully expect that God, with His wicked sense of humor, would make me the father of little girls.

And He did. (Although if you ever saw my girls, you would note that the “little” designation is not remotely accurate.) It will never be known what kind of toys Cathleen would have played with as she got older, but now that Josie is going to be five in August, one thing is perfectly clear: she LOVES her Barbies.

And to my ex-girlfriend – and any other folks who wish to judge me – I don’t care.

What does Josie do with them? She changes their clothes, shares them with her friends, has adventures with them, washes their hair, tucks them into bed. She just loves to play, and as she does, she is learning how to be an empathetic person. Listening to her play, and use her imagination, is one of the joys of my life, and it turns out that she has her Barbies also share, play nice, and be otherwise empathetic.

I can’t imagine that of the millions of Barbies sold over the years that every girl who plays with them ends up with a poor body image. That kind of negative thinking comes from far more than Barbies, and it’s up to us as parents to create a context so that we raise a young woman who is confident and not afraid to be smart, funny, and her own person. We also work to develop her interests in other ways: Josie adores drawing, loves books, and loves to roughhouse at the park.

As parents, we also have a monumental responsibility to mold our children, to raise them right. Josie has no concept as to the politics of Barbie: to her, they are dolls to be played with, nothing more, nothing less. The concept of Barbie as devil’s plaything is the kind of context that we as adults place on things. We all know that children are a tabula rasa, and what Kari and I do is reinforce Josie’s other interests as well as engage her intelligence and creativity. We also waste no opportunity to tell her how beautiful and smart she is.

The lesson is being learned: we are reminded on a constant basis, by no less an expert than Josie, that she is smarter than everyone.

So my question is this: when she grows up to be the talented, smart, and good person she is likely going to be, should we then give credit to Barbie?