Wed 07/23/2008 6:12 PM

stop pretending there's no disability

When my sister and I were young, we loved our Barbie dolls. We played all day, every day. Even when we were at school, we were acting out our dolls' lives in our heads and would fill each other in when we got home. And for as long as I can remember, even before Becky came along, many of our dolls were disabled. We built casts, crutches and braces out of anything we could get our hands on: popsicle sticks, paper, pipe cleaners, etc. We even built wheelchairs out of our Legos. Every summer, after I came back from MDA summer camp, we would have a week of camp for our Barbie dolls, and then a week with our bigger dolls (where they were the campers and we were the counselors).

The number and type of disabled dolls available is increasing, and I and others think it's fantastic. But there are some people who don't feel the same way. They say that giving a disabled child a doll that resembles them will only serve to draw attention to the fact that they are different. Well yes, it does, but the problem here is not that we are drawing attention to our differences, but that we are still teaching children that being different is bad. Stop that! Why is society still so unwilling to accept that differences like these exist and that they are not some horrible thing to be hidden away and never spoken of? And guess what... disabled kids know they're different. Pretending they're not disabled, that they're exactly like everyone else, does not do anything for their self esteem. What does do wonders, is the message that it's okay to be different, that it's perfectly normal to be abnormal. And what better way to send that message than to include as diverse a cast of characters as possible into their fantasy worlds? If the world of fantastical perfection consists only of tall, leggy, white, able-bodied blondes, what kind of message does that send to anyone who deviates from that archetype?

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4 comments/trackbacks

comment: from Daniel

One wonders if these same morons think that black baby dolls should be taken off the market because its just a constant reminder to black children they they weren't born white.

Wed 07/23/2008 6:31 PM

comment: from HelloKit

Actually one of the articles I read (I can't remember which one) said just that: that some psychologists claim that black children prefer to play with white dolls. Disgusting, isn't it?

Wed 07/23/2008 7:13 PM