With the toys industry getting so
advanced technologically, and coming up with new and exciting toys and games
every day, it may seem that there is no place for the standard doll in today’s
society. However, this is not true, and both girls and boys of all ages
continue to play with dolls from a young age and tend to have one special toy
that they identify with.
Dolls are important for children
as they allow kids to identify with adult figures in their lives and explore
their feelings when it comes to nurturing and caring for others. A child’s
first recognised experience is being looked after by their parent or parents,
so it is natural that they would want to explore this further by nurturing
something else. Because dolls (and , to an extent, bears) have a lifelike
appearance and can be given an invented personality, a child can work out their
own personality (giving aspects of it to the doll) as well as yours (by moving
these aspects into their own personality when caring for their doll).
When siblings come into the
picture, dolls can be a great help to children who have previously been the
sole recipient of any parental attention and they can work out these feelings
with their dolls. Dolls are also an instant toy, which a child can pick up and
start playing and creating with from the second they think about it. It is a
friend and a confidante for the very young that will never leave them. For this
reasons dolls have been and always will be very important to children.
Today, the toys industry must
think about how to make dolls appeal to children when there are so many
technologically advanced toys out there. One of the ways this has been done is
to make dolls more technologically advanced. You can now find dolls which are
so advanced they actually seem more like real children than dolls. They can
cry, go to the toilet, laugh and even talk, and new technologies mean they can
‘understand’ what your child says to them and hold a conversation. These dolls
are very popular, but recently a resurgence of more basic dolls has called into
question whether kids need the technology to bond with their toys. The most
popular dolls around at the moment are simple dress up dolls that allow kids to
create their own outfits for their doll and experiment with their own idea of
fashion and personality.
Barbie-like dolls have taken
precedence and give little girls (or boys) the opportunity to experiment with
what it might be like to be an adult or teenager, as well as allowing them to
build their own world and family based around their interest and imagination.
