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9486 in the collection
Baby Dolls Raise a Stink In More Ways Than One
Appalling.
By Brigid Schulte
So long, Betsy Wetsy. Baby dolls just got a
whole lot more real.
Put her on her little pink plastic toilet.
Press the purple bracelet on Baby Alive Learns
to Potty. "Sniff sniff," she chirps in a
singsong voice. "I made a stinky!"
This season's animatronic Baby Alive -- which
retails for $59.99 -- comes with special "green
beans" and "bananas" that, once fed to the
doll, actually, well, come out the other end.
"Be careful," reads the doll's promotional
literature, "just like real life, sometimes she
can hold it until she gets to the 'potty' and
sometimes she can't!" (A warning on the back of
the box reads: "May stain some surfaces.")
The mess made by the $39.95 Little Mommy Real
Loving Baby Gotta Go Doll, ("Over 60 phrases
and fun sounds!") is more hypothetical. Once
she is placed on her little toilet, a magnet
triggers a presto, change-o in the plastic
bowl: "The 'water' in the toilet disappears,
with the expected 'potty waste' appearing in
its place," says manufacturer Mattel. "Your
child can then flush the toilet. The 'water'
will reappear, while the toilet makes a very
realistic flushing sound!" And then comes the
applause.
The dolls, which are being heavily advertised
on television, are expected to be the season's
big sellers. Since the dolls were introduced to
stores this fall, managers at Wal-Mart, Target
and Toys R Us have reported trouble keeping
them in stock. And Baby Alive, listed as one of
the Hot Toys of 2008 by Hottoys2008.com, was
sold out at Wal-Mart, eToys.com and the AOL
shopping site a week before Christmas.
But not everyone thinks dolls need to be this
real. Some things, they argue, are better left
to the imagination. This battle over whether
pooping dolls are an appropriate toy is only
the latest skirmish in a long war between child
development experts and toymakers.
Psychologists say the best toys encourage
children to pretend and use make-believe
(witness the fact that children often love the
boxes their expensive toys come in more than
the toy itself). But toymakers want to use the
latest technology to make and sell ever-more
realistic toys. (Baby Alive's movements are the
result of sophisticated robotics controlled by
the same kind of microprocessor that navigates
satellites and runs nuclear power plants.)
"Retailers have bought heavily into these
dolls," said Reyne Rice, trend specialist with
the Toy Industry Association. "They feel that
these are some of the more popular items for
girls this year." Although most baby dolls are
sold in the last six weeks of the year and firm
sales figures won't be available until early
next year, Rice said indicators look good for
big Christmas sales.
The buzz is on parent online discussion groups
across the country. As with the Tickle Me Elmo
and Cabbage Patch Kids crazes of Christmases
past, one mother was so distraught that the
pooping dolls were sold out online just after
Thanksgiving that she prepared to rise at 5
a.m. to scour stores in a 100-mile radius of
her house.
At a Toys R Us in Northern Virginia last week,
Salma Bangoura filled her shopping cart with
stainless steel pots and pans for her 7-year-
old daughter's play kitchen. Her daughter
desperately wants the Baby Alive, she said, and
Bangoura is considering buying it for her for
Christmas. "She wants the toilet," she said,
shrugging. "It's so interesting. It comes with
its own food. It's not gross, as long as it's
not real."
But at a Target not far away, Gay Hee Lee,
shopping for her 2-year-old niece, picked the
Baby Alive box off the shelf only to quickly
put it back. "That," she said, "is just so
wrong."
Perhaps here is where one needs to ask a
question: Does a toilet -- and what one uses it
for -- make a good toy?
And, given the boundaries of good taste, is it
even a good idea?
Clearly, to toymakers, the answer is yes.
"For us, the peeing and pooping is pretty
magical," said Kathleen Harrington, senior
brand manager for Hasbro's Baby Alive dolls.
"As adults, we might be a little grossed out.
But it's so magical and so funny and so silly
for these girls. This little doll is coming to
life, so the little girl doesn't believe it's
just a doll. It's her baby." Harrington calls
it part of the doll's "Wow!" factor.
But to some child development experts, the
answer is a resounding no.
With 5,000 toys introduced into the market
every year, "what happens is that there's huge
competition to get noticed. And what that means
to toys is that they get more and more and more
and more outrageous," said Susan Linn,
professor of child psychology at Harvard and
director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free
Childhood. "This toy is shocking enough that
it's going to be noticed. But at best, this toy
is unnecessary. At worst, it's really gross."
But Jim Silver, editor of Time to Play, a Web
magazine that reviews toys, says children want
reality.
"By the time they're 5 or 6, they don't want a
play cellphone, they want a real cellphone,"
Silver said. "A baby doll is all about
nurturing. So what Mom went through with them,
they want to go through with their dolls. And
how do you do real potty training without
pooping?" Silver said he laughed when he first
saw the pooping dolls and wondered if they were
necessary. Although he said he has been sworn
to secrecy about next year's new toys, an early
peek shows reality is only going to get more
real. "You're going to see the envelope pushed
to make baby dolls as real as possible without
being offensive in any way.
And, he said, it's not as if the toymakers
don't know what they're doing. Mattel's Little
Mommy dolls, he said, are the biggest-selling
baby dolls on the market, with annual sales
upwards of $50 million. Baby Alive dolls, which
debuted in 1973 and were retooled and
reintroduced to the market a couple of years
ago after a decade-long hiatus, are the No. 2
seller.
It's the kind of trend that makes Linn angry
enough to write books, such as her recent "The
Case for Make Believe."
"This is part of a greater trend to create toys
that do everything," she said. "And in the
process of marketing those toys to children and
flooding the market with those toys, what we're
doing is depriving children of opportunities
for creative play. And that's the foundation of
learning, of critical thinking, of creativity,
of developing the capacity to wrestle with
life, to make meaning of it. It's essential to
their human development. What's happening is
that toymakers are designing these toys that
look great in ads but in fact really add
nothing to children's inner life or their
creative play."
High on Linn's Christmas toy shopping list:
crayons, paper, blocks, stuffed animals and
dolls that don't talk or move, much less say
"Hurry, hurry" when they're about to mess their
pants. "A really, really good toy is 90 percent
child and 10 percent toy," she said. "But those
are not the bestsellers."
What both sides of the play wars agree on is
that children at the age of playing with baby
dolls, generally ages 3 or 4 to 7, are
endlessly fascinated by bodily functions, thus
the popularity of such books as "Walter the
Farting Dog," booger-green slime and squishy,
squeezable, see-through toys that allow
children to feel animals' guts, on shelves now.
And potty training -- either because children
are going through it or because they remember
what it was like -- is a big, big deal.
That, manufacturers say, is why they're
creating realistic dolls.
"Potty training is an important developmental
milestone for nearly every child," Michael
Shore, vice president of World Wide Consumer
Insights for Mattel, wrote in an e-mail. "At
around the age of two, many kids are
demonstrating signs of readiness which include
key motor skills, language skills, the ability
to follow directions, etc. At this age,
research has proven that dolls serve as
effective tools to teach by imitation rather
than relying entirely on a potty training
child's limited language skills."
Shore goes on to explain that the Little Mommy
Gotta Go Doll was "uniquely designed with
innovative features to model both types of
potty training behaviors: 'poop and pee' " and
that these "unique actions" help encourage
"successful potty training."
Indeed, potty training dolls have become all
the rage since 2006, when writer Teri Crane
(the self-proclaimed "Potty Pro") published her
book "Potty Train Your Child in Just One Day,"
and her doll-using method was endorsed by TV's
Dr. Phil McGraw. Now, the market is saturated
with dolls like Potty Patty, Potty Scotty and
anatomically correct, vanilla-scented Emma and
Paul dolls.
Child development experts, not surprisingly,
are again on the opposite side of market forces
in the potty wars. Claire Lerner is director of
parenting resources at Zero to Three, a
nonprofit organization that promotes the health
and development of infants and toddlers. She
said that such claims of instant potty training
are "unfair and exploitive" and that whether a
child uses a doll, potty training, as it has
for centuries, takes the time that it takes.
"Toilet training in this country has taken on a
life of its own and become so much more complex
than it really needs to be," she said. "And
parent anxiety about it has just, unfortunately
for everybody, often made it much more
stressful. Toymakers are clever. They tune into
what's on the minds of parents." In her view,
children don't need a doll to learn how to use
a toilet. And they don't need a doll that poops
to have fun. "You just don't need to go that
far," she said.
That's something Alexandria mom Nancy Vigna, a
military planner, thinks. But the pooping Baby
Alive is the only thing her 4-year-old
daughter, Corinne, really wants for Christmas,
Vigna said. (That and a Barbie cash register.)
"The last thing she needs is another doll,"
Vigna said. Her daughter is so enamored with
diapering that she pines to change her younger
brother and plasters her baby dolls' behinds so
thoroughly that they look like they're wearing
cocoons. "This is the baby doll she's been
waiting for. It makes a real mess," Vigna said,
sighing. "I'm not looking forward to it."
Then Vigna had to excuse herself. Her 21-month-
old son, like Baby Alive, had just made a
stinky in the bathtub, and she had to go.
— Brigid Schulte
Washington Post
2008-12-22
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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