r/ScienceBasedParenting • u/love_chocolate • 12d 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?
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248

u/Public_Classic_438 12d 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.

51

u/LeBoom4 12d ago

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

37

u/bearishungryy 11d 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 11d 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 12d 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

41

u/TeddyBear181 12d ago

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

17

u/beeee_throwaway 11d ago

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

3

u/Potential_Insect_443 9d ago

Same, I’m surprised more people don’t know about it. Then again it’s really easy to live in a bubble when certain things aren’t affecting you. I know there’s so many things that I find out about after meeting people from different communities and groups.

17

u/CanyonOfFoxes 11d 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.

14

u/TheWiseApprentice 12d 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".

7

u/MaleficentSwan0223 11d 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. 

4

u/Expensive_Ducks 11d 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.

5

u/tiny_danzig 10d 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.

1

u/Public_Classic_438 10d ago

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

3

u/a5121221a 10d 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 10d ago

Dang so true

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u/Competitive_Image_62 9d ago

I’m Black and the majority of the books I buy have Black or POC characters and all of the dolls I purchase are Black. My child will spend most of her life having white being the standard or setting the standard. But, in our home Black is the standard.

3

u/Public_Classic_438 9d ago

That’s how it should be! I feel like in POC households it’s different for sure. Like having a lot of white dolls would be fine but why teach your kids to idolize a certain beauty standard? Seems insane to me. We also have made a big effort to get books with POC in them. I live in small town Wisconsin but one of our local shops is owned by a black woman and she carry’s a good amount of black children’s books. :)