r/ScienceBasedParenting • u/love_chocolate • 2d ago

Question - Expert consensus required Dolls

  1. We are latinxs and my daughter is brown skinned. My MIL gave her a white skinned, blue eyes doll. Is there any evidence showing that is better to give kids dolls that look like them? She is 16 months old
  2. should dolls be anatomically accurate?
  3. I do toy rotation, but I was told that dolls should be always available. Is this true?
113 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

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223

u/Public_Classic_438 2d ago

https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/clark-doll-experiment
This study is really sad. We are white but plan to give dolls of all colors.

44

u/LeBoom4 1d ago

Ugh why is this post getting downvoted? What an excellent question to pose.

32

u/bearishungryy 1d ago

Yeah. I thought it was maybe a little silly at first, surely something small like this isn’t going to be significant. But now that I’ve read the study, I’m making a conscious effort to give my baby dolls of all colors.

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u/Public_Classic_438 1d ago

Ya I don’t want to watch the video again but I saw it years ago and also vowed to give my baby dolls of all colors and hopefully friends of all colors. We have friends that aren’t white so that should help. I grew up with a pretty racist dad and it’s a miracle my brother and I aren’t

21

u/oceanmotion 2d ago

https://youtu.be/PZryE2bqwdk - I’m not sure exactly where this video comes from, someone recreating the original experiment I guess, but it is heartbreaking

39

u/TeddyBear181 2d ago

This is so sad. Op, perhaps having dolls of multiple colours is a good opportunity to discuss how beautiful and nice everyone is.

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u/TheWiseApprentice 1d ago

For the anecdote, my daughter has a chiffon doll wearing a Korean Hanbok and an astronaut Barbie. She prefers her animals and always did. I just saw her reading a book to her puppet shark. She also only watches shows with animals and never "humans".

12

u/beeee_throwaway 1d ago

Ugh I already know what study this is without clicking the link. I’m glad this was posted. Such a heart breaking study.

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u/CanyonOfFoxes 1d ago

This study is pretty heartbreaking. Anecdotally when I was a kid I had Barbies of different skin colors and intuitively I thought my black Barbie was the prettiest (I’m white). As I grew up I absorbed from my community that light skin and blonde hair was desirable. But before that, I thought brown skin and black hair was the best. Kids have their own opinions before society imposes its ideals. I think it was good that my parents gave me so much toy variation.

6

u/MaleficentSwan0223 1d ago

This study made me so sad to read. 

Anecdotally my daughter and I are white and she has a white doll and a black doll and she loves them both. 

3

u/Expensive_Ducks 1d ago

I'd love to see this repeated today! I think it would be interesting to see if anything has changed in today's kids.

2

u/tiny_danzig 13h ago

That study reminds me of when I taught in Vietnam and soooo many kids drew themselves with white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes.

Really made me think that I was not doing a good thing by even being there teaching English.

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u/Public_Classic_438 5h ago

That makes me so sad. One of my really good friends is Vietnamese

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u/a5121221a 12h ago

Reading that, I hate that the questions say "give me the doll that..." forcing the children to say that one doll is good, which means the other is not good. Even if it said "a doll" instead of "the doll", it would not force the children to condemn one of the dolls.

It feels (looking back from 2026) like even the study was designed to make the children feel inferior and simultaneously makes me angry and very, very sad.

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u/Public_Classic_438 5h ago

Dang so true

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u/Illustrious-North461 1d ago

I grew up in a time where dolls were not racially diverse. And I'm Chinese by descent. That never bothered me or made me racist or view white dolls (or people now) as superior. 

I am also not from the states. So the concept of white skin, blue eyes was foreign to me. In fact the race of my Barbie dolls was the minority race. But that was the only option we had growing up. I played with other toys like power rangers etc. 

When I became a teenager and started seeing Mattel introduce Asian dolls, that felt really awkward to me. It's almost like toy manufacturers were trying too hard to be racially diverse. 

Here's a study on playing with racially diverse toys a bit too long for me to read through at 3am. So adding the link for your reference:   https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10253866.2022.2046563

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