Working with Kids

  Working in schools can really keep you honest. Children tend to speak without filters. Perhaps because I usually work with one or two at a time, once they get to know me, they ask questions they would probably not ask their teachers.

            They particularly like to know how old adults are. When I was in my 40s and they’d ask, it came as a shock when some would tell me I was older than their grandmother. I didn’t really need to hear the follow-up statement, “My mother had me when she was 15.”

            Children want to know if you have children or grandchildren. Here’s one of my favorite conversations:

            “How many children do you have?”

            “I don’t have any children.”

            “Well, then, how many grandchildren do you have?”

            As if.

            What I could never answer was, after saying I had no children, when a child would ask, “Why not?”

            I had plenty of sarcastic answers, such as I might give an adult, but they’re hardly appropriate. It occurred to me to tell them, “Because I hate children.” But it might scare them. They certainly wouldn’t understand the sarcasm.

            As I got older, I would make a joke of being old when telling them of my experiences in school.

            “When I went to school with Fred Flintstone…” got me some wide-eyed looks until they realized I was joking. I stopped using that phrase when one student asked, “Who’s Fred Flintstone?”

            Now I usually say, “When I was in school and dinosaurs roamed the earth…” Usually, that gets a laugh. Occasionally, I still get a wide-eyed stare and a, “Really?”

            More recently, I was playing Jacks with a sixth grade student during an OT session. Because it’s a game where you can’t really keep the ball on a table, we sat on the floor to play. Once I was seated, the student made the comment that I wouldn’t be able to get up when we were finished.

            “Why not?” I asked.

            “Well, you’re old.”

            “I got down here, didn’t I?” I asked. Perhaps my look put him in his place. Perhaps the fact that I soundly beat him at a game I learned 55 years ago did it. Or maybe it was the fact that I was able to get up faster to retrieve his out-of-control ball than he was. Regardless, he hasn’t made a comment about my age since.

            Yes, kids can really make you feel old.

Don’t Mess with an Icon

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Bridget McGowan

 Much is written these days about shaming, whether it be body shaming or making fun of people with disabilities. I admire the efforts people make to help others feel secure about themselves just as they are.

It’s a shame they don’t extend that open-mindedness to the imaginary world of dolls.

When I was growing up, the first fashion doll, Barbie, came onto the market. While I had friends who weren’t allowed to own Barbie because she was considered too provocative by some mothers, most people from my generation onwards had at least one Barbie doll.

Barbie wasn’t just a doll. She was elegance and glamour. She owned clothes most of us could only look at in fashion magazines. She had a career or two (nurse, flight attendant, secretary – the allowable female jobs in those days) so that those of us who played with her could imagine ourselves having careers. There was even a Barbie Color and Curl kit, that included wigs, a wig stand, a doll hair dryer and our first acid-base chemistry experiment to change the color of the hair of the wigs, so that some could even dream of having that other acceptable female career – hairdresser.

Yes, Barbie had measurements that have been poked fun at for decades, but I don’t think little girls who played with her really imagined growing up to look exactly like her. She simply looked like a grown-up, unlike all of the baby dolls we had had previously, and a wardrobe of difficult to put on clothes to help us improve our fine motor and problem-solving skills. It is true that only Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch were built anything like her, but that didn’t matter to little girls of that time.

Initially, Barbie had two hair colors: brunette bubble cut and blonde cotton ponytail. Her friend, Midge was the red-headed representative, just as her little sister, Skipper, represented the prepubescent, and her cousin, Francie, the teenager. Later, along with the Civil Rights movement and international trends, Barbie became available in different races, with different cultural costumes. This was all well and good, but now things have gone a bit too far.

Because of the protests that Barbie is setting up an unrealistic body image for girls, she now comes in various body types: tall and willowy, shorter and stouter and a range in between. Oh please!

Barbie is an icon. She was a fashion doll, therefore, something of a model. That is who Barbie is. While I applaud different hair and skin colors, these didn’t change the basic image of Barbie. A girl should be able to have a doll of her race to play with if she wants. Call me a hypocrite if you wish, but really, Barbie isn’t an American Girl doll. She isn’t meant to represent everyone or even Everywoman. Changing her basic design to appease adults who think she needs to be all-inclusive is just wrong.

If you want a taller doll, a shorter doll, one with more “meat” on her bones or less bosom on her chest, make a different doll, one who is friends with Barbie or a sister or cousin, as Midge, Francie and Skipper were. If all dolls have to have counterparts to all people, Bratz dolls, with their oversized heads and spindly legs would have to come off the market. No one is making a variety of them to conform to all shapes and sizes.

I think the real question I have for people worrying about Barbie’s shape is, in what universe did any little girl ever dream of growing up to look like one of her dolls?

Barbie, for all of her press, is a doll.

She’s pretty.

She has a dream house.

She has lots of clothes.

But she’s just a doll.

She has an emasculated boyfriend and she doesn’t even have nipples. She’s not anatomically correct. no one dreams of growing up to be Barbie.

Leave the doll alone. Create other dolls, and judge their success or failure on sales.