My Daughter Doesn’t Play With Dolls
Let me clarify: she is not forbidden to. I am not one of those parents who insists on purely gender neutral toys to shield my daughter from bias. I don’t actually believe there is anything bad in choosing traditional femininity. Just as long as there is a choice.
But my daughter has no taste for dolls. She has a few of them: little ones, and some by weird brands, and a couple of barbies. She has a baby doll with a stroller.
She mostly ignores them. They’ve come out once or twice, when they’d piled on top of other toys.
Teaching her interactive play seemed important, so I’ve tried to engage her with the dolls. The closest she’d come to it were the rare occasions she’d decided to put these little figurine animals to “eat” at a mini dinner table; even then her style of play was so dynamic, she needed to change the figurines quickly one after the other because otherwise she got bored.
She displays some interest in the baby doll, mostly because it’s really fun to push it really fast down the corridor in its stroller.
My daughter likes fast things, loud things, toys which move and flash and play a sound. She likes a fast dynamic in her play.
The refusal of people to believe me is exhausting. Family members and friends alike are exhaustingly persistent in buying more dolls to fill our drawers. Sometimes they’ll bring them as an “additional gift” – hence the mini dolls – as if they were indulging me with buying something else. They’ll pass it to her with words of what passes as reassurance.
“She’s a girl, after all.”
Hey, you!
My Daughter Doesn’t Play With Dolls. She’s not doing it because it’s a political statement, she’s not being contrary. She’s a child.
Children like loud fast rowdy things.
My Daughter Doesn’t Play With Dolls. She doesn’t know what feminism is, but you could learn from her: she was given a choice and she chose the car. It’s because it plays a really loud song and goes “vrrrruuuuuum”. She likes that.
My Daughter Doesn’t Play With Dolls. It’s not because you haven’t found the right type yet. You could buy her a thousand. She likes to put them in strollers and run fast pushing them from room to room. The most advanced interactive doll will not make her suddenly like quietly sitting in a corner, feeding the baby milk or changing its nappy.
She’s two for the love of everything holy! Let her fucking run.
My Daughter Doesn’t Play With Dolls. She could, if she wanted to. It’s why I haven’t thrown the ones we have away, even if all they do is gather dust at this point.
But she doesn’t want to right now.
And let me tell you:
I don’t like these cisgender heterosexuals pushing down their stereotype-filled sexual identity on my child. They’re beginning to piss me off.
