Hey Doll,
Act Your Age
Written By Jacquelyn Mitchard
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Dad thinks kids will tease their daughter for still playing with dolls. Mom thinks: Has the world gone mad? A tale of modern childhood, with accessories.
"It's just not good for her," said my husband. "And it costs a lot of money."
"Not so very much money," I replied. I was fibbing. It cost about $90, which, in a family of nine, isn't chump change. So I drew the Dad's-little-darling card. I said sweetly, "But she wants it so much. And it will be her only birthday present."
"Other girls will make fun of her when she has friends over to play," said Chris. "Other kids her age don't have sweatshirts with teddy bears on them and sleep with a moose that wears goggles and flippers. They play . . . computer hockey and . . . alien war . . . and stuff."
"Mia plays computer hockey and space aliens," I said, "but she also plays dress-up with her doll, and she wants another doll so that the doll she has already can have a friend."
"Kids will think she's babyish," Chris said.
Mia is 6.
I had held off getting her first doll, when Mia turned 4, because I thought she might ruin it. But she treated the doll – one that looked like a modern-day girl, in fact a lot like Mia – as if it were a holy relic, carefully putting away "Amy's" shoes and pajamas in an old suitcase I let her have. I held off getting that second doll for her fifth birthday, because I thought her baby brother might tear out "Marisol's" luxuriant hair. But now her baby brother was a toddler, and he played (nicely) with Amy and was even occasionally invited for "tea." It was now or never, I figured. Yet according to Dad, who supervises the bulk of the playdates in our home, Mia had apparently already pushed the outside of the dolly age envelope. In first grade and unwilling to give up playing with dolls, could she really be behind the curve? Yes, said my husband, from what he'd seen at home and in her class.
By Chris's standards, Mia should at this point be yearning for Prada and pedicures. Simp that she is, though, she wanted another doll. She even wanted the spiffy child-sized outfit that matched this doll, so that she and Marisol could be "samies."
My husband and I went to our respective corners and agreed to think it over.
My husband mulled over his need to protect our daughter from being ostracized.
I called the doll company and ordered the doll.
I ended up spending, uh, more than I intended. Along with Marisol and the matching child outfit, I chose the cheerleader costume and the puppy in its pet carrier.
It was an act of defiance, but look, I'm not a renegade. I'm not even a retrograde. I don't want my children to stay babies forever. But for heaven's sake, Mia's entire life span encompasses all of 72 months. I have sweaters older than her. Moreover, despite his protestations, Chris and I had made a pact to buck prevailing notions. We believe that the "teen-by-10" phenomenon is avoidable if parents work at staving off prematurely adult clothing and behaviors. We've vowed to hold on to every second of all the kids' childhoods in a hammerlock.
So why was Chris so worried about one measly (though, by now $150 with extras) little doll? It wasn't as if Mia was still watching Teletubbies.
Somehow, I thought, her daddy's worries underlined the two-faced nature of our culture at large. One face moans how sad, sad, sad it is that we've "lost" childhood as our children grow up in a culture drenched in sexy, sassy images. The other face takes a secret delight in how "cute" those mini-adults really are. Kids these days, they're all that way. If you send them to school in anything but a certain brand of hoodie sweatshirt, it's social suicide on the jungle gym.
Even out here in the Midwest, little fashionistas are imprinted with what's "right to wear" startlingly early. I can't imagine how it is to raise a child in Manhattan. Already, Mia's pals wear little heels – to church. They wear lip gloss to birthday parties. They wear miniskirts and crop tops. ("Don't make fun of Shaina," Mia warns me. "Her shirt got shrunk in the wash.")Mia isn't permitted to do any of those things, nor does she want to. She doesn't even get to watch TV except on weekends. But, as one of Mia's older brothers once gently explained, our family is also regarded in the neighborhood as nitwits.
It's true. Kids are only mildly shocked when they learn we have never owned a video game system; it's their parents who really question our sanity, who ask if we also grow all our own food.
We aren't those superswell Triple-A parents, though, who do 2K runs with their children, and homeschool them, and turn every moment outdoors into a lesson in rural botany. Chris and I allow the kids to watch too much TV on weekends. We take our birthday cakes gooey and filled with preservatives, our movies PG-13, our CDs bleeped, and our burgers with cheese.
And yet thus far, the older kids (while they are lazy, fender-denting, haircut-avoiding teens) seem to be passing on our ethos, perhaps in the way doctors make their interns suffer 36-hour shifts — not because it's necessary, but because they had to do it themselves. The older kids declared the house a Barbie-free zone for the "little girls" even before we did. They volunteered to give up the Game Boy an innocent relative gave them because the little kids were fighting over it.
Being boys, they too were concerned about Mia's dolls, only because they don't want her to grow up to be a girly girl. They're well satisfied with Mia's big sister, Francie, who has never met a basketball she didn't like or a skirt that she did. But Mia is a combo child, a scamp who loves campfires and blanket forts but also scarves and sachets and anything sparkly.
She is who she is.
I wasn't quite so fragile and girlish as Mia, nor so robust and athletic as Francie. I played baseball and army hospital but I also had my dolls — dollhouse dolls, not dolls that looked like real girls, like Mia's. They had different outfits, and my mother glued together shoeboxes for their home. We made curtains and used yarn from old sweaters for rugs.
I even remembered, as I tried to rack up justifications for Mia's second doll, a moment from my own childhood. My mother took me to a department store and, on impulse, gave in to my plea to buy a family of miniature costumed rabbits. I cherished them along with my dollhouse people. I remember her telling my grandmother, "You'd think someone had given her a million dollars," which was exactly how I felt.
Rather unfairly, I shared this story with Chris before telling him the total of what Mia's birthday doll and regalia cost. He was, predictably, touched, and predictably forgiving. He said, though, with a sigh, "You know, she'll only play with these dolls for a year or two." But a year or two, at this point, is a third of Mia's life. Perhaps in some sense it's the best third.
It was only when I'd written down the number of my receipt and was about to file the catalog that I saw, printed along the bottom of the page, Products Appropriate for Children 8 and Over.
About the Author: Jacquelyn Mitchard is the author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Cage of Stars. She and her husband live in Wisconsin with their seven children. And several dolls.
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