Evaluate a Toy- Barbie - Grade: A PDF

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Victoria Catizone PS-252 Professor Shaenfield February 9th, 2018

Barbie: Unlocking the Limitless Potential in Every Girl

The Barbie Doll is a toy that was created by Ruth Handler in the late 1950s. Handler was a mother who noticed that her daughter’s toy choices were more limited than her son’s. While her son had the option of playing with toys that allowed him to imagine himself in a variety of professions, her daughter was limited to play options that included being a mom or a caregiver (“To inspire”, 2019). Barbie was created with the purpose of “inspiring the limitless potential in every girl” utilizing the slogan and tagline “you can be anything” (“To inspire”, 2019). The toy and the brand served to break the mold of society and enforce the message that girls have the same potential as boys. The doll modeled women in a variety of career paths including, doctors, pilots, athletes, political figures, and teachers, giving girls something to aspire to and straying from the traditional mindset that girls should grow up to only take care of their families and work within the house. The Barbie Doll is intended for girls, ages 6+, and has a highly variant price point ranging from $9.99 to collectable dolls priced at $150 each. According to the manufacturer of Barbie, Mattel, the doll aims to inspire young girls through imaginative play and present them with limitless opportunities (“To inspire”, 2019). The manufacturer focuses on helping young girls to dream and imagine that they can do anything, and close what they refer to as the “dream gap”- the societal ideal pushed on girls that they are

inferior to men (“To inspire”, 2019). Barbie provides girls with limitless routes for imaginative play and the ability to dream a bigger future for themselves that surpasses stereotypes. The toy is geared towards children that are in what Piaget describes as the “preoperational stage”. This stage is a part of cognitive development that lasts from approximately ages 2 through 7. Within this stage of development, “children begin to represent the world with words, images and drawings. Symbolic thought goes beyond simple connections of sensory information and physical action. Stable concepts are formed, mental reasoning emerges, egocentrism is present, and magical beliefs are constructed” (Santrock 2014, p. 176). The Barbie doll gives children an outlet to mimic and represent what they see in the outside world through the dolls, while also having the ability to cater to their magical and imaginative beliefs and create different scenarios with the toy. When playing with a Barbie doll, young girls are required to use imaginative skills while simultaneously representing the world around them. The toy can be played with individually or in a group, providing for different levels of social development. When playing with the doll individually, children will utilize private speech and while playing with others they can practice social communication which are both important skills in cognitive development (Santrock 2014). Care-givers can interact with their children while playing with Barbie dolls the same way that the child’s friend would participate when playing with the dolls. The care-giver should let the child take the lead and initiate the course of the imaginative play, and go along with wherever the child desires to take them within the realm of play. The Barbie isn’t completely necessary to stimulate the imaginative and cognitive development that it is intended to in the preoperational stage. Instead, care-givers and children could engage in the same type of imaginative play without the dolls, each taking on an and acting

out an imagined role like they would if they had the Barbie dolls in hand. Although the child would no longer be using the dolls to mimic and represent the world, but real life scenarios are still being mimicked through role-play.

Works Cited Barbie Career Fashion 5 Dolls Set. (n.d.). Retrieved February 22, 2019, from https://www.amazon.com/Barbie-Career-Fashion-Dolls-Set/dp/B0762KFH73 Santrock, J. W. (2014). Child development. New York: McGraw-Hill Education. To inspire the limitless potential in every girl. (n.d.). Retrieved February 21, 2019, from https://barbie.mattel.com/en-us/about.html...