Pester power: my 4 yo really wants Barbie, what to do?

I find it a bit odd the assertion that just because something didn't harm you that it is therefor harmless.

Yes, you can grow up to be a true feminist if you have barbies but you also might not. Barbie reinforces the idea that your body is not good enough. I wonder how many people here who say that barbie hasn't harmed them have felt compelled to diet (and not for genuine health reasons like your fibromialga (sp) is easier to manage when you weigh less) or alter their body in some way or felt they must shave their legs or under arms or do their hair every morning or wear make up to work or wear high heals.

No, barbie may not actively harm girls but she is a tool of the patriarchy to teach girls that looks are important and that a woman should always be judged on her appearance no matter her other accomplishments and that their time and thoughts should be taken up by appearance and striving for a patriarchal beauty construct.

Another one who had loads of 'barbies' (hotchpotch collection of barbies, cindys, and disney character dolls) as a child and is perfectly happy with their body.

If I remember correctly they tended to go camping with my brother's action men a lot.I liked them specifically because they had 'grown-up' bodies, so could do things my child and baby shaped dolls couldn't, like have a job or drive around or be mummies.

Just one thing tho, if you do decide to get her one. Try to find one with the same skin/hair/eye colour as your daughter. I remember loving curly brown haired, blue eyed 'barbie' the most because she looked like me.

I had loads of Barbie was not obsessed with becoming a vapid airhead. I just liked making her clothes, swapping her heads, occasionally making her and Ken do things they really shouldn't be able to do with their neuter bodies. Stick to the sports stars/vets/doctors and you should be fine.

When we were on hols in Spain when dd was about 3, we walked into a toy shop and I uttered the words "dd, you can have anything in this shop you want. Anything." Yep.......no hesitation, she chose a Barbie.

She had had every steering-away-from-that-sort-of-thing-imaginable in her first 3 years.

But now at 11y.o. she, as an individual, shows little/no sign of being 'dupped' into Barbie-world and all the messages that come with it. I do think we can underestimate the critical faculties of our children, and over-play our anxieties over the messages being delivered by toys. Their understanding of how the world actually works, and how Barbie is massively inconsistent with it, get worked out.

DD1 has a dentist Barbie and it scared the Bejaysis out of me when I was changing DD1's bed and out of nowhere a dentist drill sounded and an American woman said "now spit" ....

I would never have bought one, but a friend of mine with older DDs gave me a load of them (think Malifilence upthread proportions). The DDs like playing with them, they tend to have a lot of adventures. I'm not deeply worried about the body image because all dolls tend to be a bit odd in some way. They have saggy old me for body image!

Like this but with a chalkboard and suchlike

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/BARBIE-CAN-ART-TEACHER-PLAYSET-BRAND-NEW-BOX-/140628227365?pt=UK_Toys_Creative_Educational_RL&hash=item20be187525

I've just bought my niece a teacher barbie in tesco, it has little bookshelves with it, they have a camping one too

I used to agonize over Barbie as well. I have 3 dds - one of them was a 'Barbie girl", the more pink and fluffy and sparkly the better, dolls were her passion (including Barbies) and all she wanted was to have babies when she grew up (which she declared would be 16!), another daughter would only wear trousers and only liked fluffy toys (all "male" personalities) and no dolls ever - the other one couldn't see the point of teddies or dolls, climbed high trees at 5 and regularly decapitated her sister's Barbies when she wanted to wind her up (it worked in a spectacular melt-down fashion too).

They all knew the meaning of the words "sexist crap" and "gender stereotype" well before their friends - but to be honest they were very different people with very different tastes and personalities, I could have no more forced the tree-climber to play with a Barbie than I could convince the Barbie lover she really just wanted teddy bears. I took the view that the best thing I could do was to make it clear (in an age appropriate way) what my views were on this kind of stuff. It has meant for interesting discussions where they have tried to convince me of the value of "America's top model" and offered to pay for me to have a makeover . Now that they are very opinionated young women the conversations are even more interesting as I can explain my feminism in much more depth - so my one piece of advice is no matter what you decide about 'allowing' Barbie-type dolls or not, she will be exposed to the images and ideas, so the most important thing you can do is to talk about why you don't like them and keep the conversation going!

I'm actually glad mine are all so different as it forced me to recognise that I had to have a relationship with who they were, not who I might want them to be ...
I have to admit though that I felt a real sense of relief when the Barbie & baby lover got to 18 not pregnant and the tree-climber got to 18 alive .

all children want shoddy plastic shit. i gave each of mine $20 to spend at the sodding book fair yesterday. dd1 got two v sensible books, ds1 bought two anti-bullying plastic wrist bands and the most ridiculous plastic skeleton fist pointer (it was broken by the time he got home, incidentally) and dd2 bought a wimpy kid book and a phineas and ferb book.

dd2 is 8 btw and has an entire box of barbies and associated bolleaux. they rarely get played with, even to make zip lines... although i might encourage a skeleton bob track to be built when we have enough snow... i think we could get one from the lower deck dwon to the ground in a drift! anyway, barbie is unlikely to have a major impact on your dd's life if all other aspects of her upbringing are equal.

i don't like barbie, but she ain't all that. just another bit of plastic disposable. wouldn't be my first choice, and i've never paid money for one, but the marketing works so well that you can't avoid some contact.

read 'cinderella ate my daughter'

and then buy her a barbie.

but the most non-conformist one you can find. some of them are less 'eat me i'm delicious' than others.

she's at the point where conformity is really important developmentally - she can break out of that and become an individual when it is developmentally apporpriate and by using your provision of all sorts of other not quite so gendered and pinked options, and by the way you bring her up.

but desiring conformity at 4 with your peer group is entirely normal, and doesn't mean she's necessarily going to grow up with body issues or be a cheerleader.

if it helps, i had a sindy when i was younger, and we used to set up string death slides so that they could fly out of the upstairs bedroom windows to the garden. they don't have to be used to play 'where's ken, i look so purty, what shall i wear next?' we didn't buy ours barbies, but dh's grandmother bought dd1 her first one when she was 3 ffs.

dd1 is now 12 and very much an individual. i'm not even sure she owns a skirt or dress...

A friend of mind when I was a kid said she wasn't allowed Barbie "because it is sexist"..

I had no idea what sexism was at the time, or that the inequality in male/female representation I was definately aware of was called 'sexism'..

I would see this as an opportunity to start teaching her about how cool girls actually are and that Barbie's impossible bodyshape and clothes would make it impossible for her to fulfil all the cool stuff girls can actually do..

i.e.- do not buy it - it is Beelzebub's mascot. I wish I had learned what sexism was earlier and that my mum had protected me from it more. Instead I found myself unenthusiastically playing with deformed plastic crap (because everyone else had it) and wondering what it was that I wasn't 'getting'.

Don't parents say no any more? There were loads of toys that I wanted and couldn't have when I was a kid. I don't even know why my parents refused to buy most of it (although the word "tat" did come into it quite often, iirc, as I was particularly drawn to shoddy plastic shit).

Hasn't harmed me.

No way am I getting barbie for DD. She is a terrible, terrible representation of an adult woman to children. I don't care that she now has a job or anything like that. Physically she is a ridiculous role model for children and at far too young an age she promotes physical perfection and what an adult "should" look like.

Your DD doesn't need Barbie for role play. There are other dolls out there for that. She will not miss out, she won't be that odd child who couldn't have barbie. It will not turn her into some unsocialised loon who can't make friends.

Really shocked that so many people in the fwr section don't seem to see a problem with barbie dolls.

I had a barbie and I loved it. It's just playing she doesnt know it represents anything. Its just a pretty dolly with pretty dresses.

My friend tried to keep her daughter from dolls, toy kitchens etc. First day of nursery makes a beeline for the baby dolls and carried it round all day.

Saw these in Tesco yesterday. The appearance is still thin but more scope for a develop your own style not just saccharine philosophy.

www.amazon.co.uk/Monster-High-Cleo-De-Nile/dp/B0058NTKB4/ref=sr_1_6?s=kids&ie=UTF8&qid=1321627860&sr=1-6

Hateful poor quality junk. She'll be fed up of how fuzzy the hair goes and how easily the clothes rip, long before she's old enough to see the impossible figure thing.
Get her a build a bear in a pink frilly dress and sparkly shoes. She'll be able to dress that herself, hug it and take it to bed.
My 13 and 10 yearolds bears are still going strong, barbies went in the bin.

I bought a vet Barbie last year for 4-year-old DD but my feminist husband got the better of me and hid it on top of the cupboard. I'm watching this thread to see whether I can persuade him to relent...must say I'm still waiting to see a really rigorous condemnation.

oh yes, I meant body IMAGE issues!

There are a couple of quite smug looking Kens up there .

I think the collection of Norwegian trolls DH brought back from Norway for her (or are they Trogs?) help with any body image issues

I would just get a Barbie. My DD has one Barbie and having not made a big issue of it, she doesn't particularly favour it over her other toys.

love the name FFS.

one of them has wellies. I can't remember which. Maybe there is a 'festival barbie'.

Wow, there's a paleontologist barbie!