A while back, my friend Mary was telling me about a song that her daughter “was addicted to.” It was a song by a girl saying that she would do whatever she had to do to get her guy, including turning cartwheels. Mary speculated that the girls probably just liked the fun, whimsical melody and the catchy chorus, but that she really didn’t like the message contained within the song.
As we discussed it, I shared with her what I have done with my kids. Recently, she told me that she had taken my advice and found it helpful, so I thought I would share it here with you.
It turns out, if you completely deny a child her desire for something, whether it’s a toy gun or a princess dress, she will become obsessed by it. We tell a boy “no toy guns” hoping his desire will just fade away. Ironically, he just grows more and more obsessed with it. The desire doesn’t shrink, it expands, until it takes on the dimensions of a fetish.
Another friend once told me that a child whose parents had outlawed all toys in his house had come over to her house to play with her kids. He approached her, feverishly clutching a Matchbox car, and asked, “Can I have this?” She said, “Sure, you can play with it.” He shook his head and said, “No, can I have it?” When you’re starving, a crumb looks like a feast, and this child was starving.
That’s how it works: thwarted wanted only increases the wanting. When my daughter was 3 and 4, she desperately wanted Barbie dolls and princess dresses. At that time, I didn’t understand about thwarted wanting, I just wanted to protect my child from the barrage of large-breasted, impossibly narrow waisted, long hair, high heeled, painted nail, makeup wearing female images that abound on toy store shelves and movie screens. I thought that by isolating her from them, she wouldn’t know what she was missing and it wouldn’t matter.
It didn’t work out that way. She still saw the images and the toys, but because they were forbidden fruit, they took on a larger-than life halo.
Eventually, I realized I had to give ground somewhere, because she was developing a full scale obsession. So I decided that instead of buying a princess dress off the shelf – and thus endorsing what I so strongly opposed – I would make one. It was orange, with a large pink floral “poof” on each side. She loved that dress, and literally wore it every single day. I had to repair the shoulder seams, not once but twice! It was in that dress that “Bootiful” took place. And it was in that dress that I realized it wasn’t the dress that was the problem, it was the dialogue around it.
I figured out that if I didn’t talk to her about why I didn’t like the whole “princess” dialogue, she would have no other option but to absorb the one that was out there. Namely, that princesses are “bootiful and thas it.” (Princesses aren’t allowed to be smart, strong, brave, or solve their own problems.) So I decided to change tactics. I told my kids that I would let them watch a Barbie movie, but that they had to understand why I didn’t particularly like Barbie.
We sat down right there in the library and had a discussion about how all the “beautiful” characters on Barbie look pretty much the same, with a super skinny waist, long – usually blond – hair, and light skin. How they walked around on tiptoe all the time, with their arms held at an odd angle that caused them to walk funny. We talked about all the people we knew, and how NONE of them looked like what you’d see on Barbie, but yet, they were still beautiful. Then we watched it together, and they were able to see all the caricatures, taking great pleasure in pointing them out. My son developed a pretty hysterical imitation of the “Barbie walk”
The point is, once we deconstructed the Barbie movie, took it apart and looked at it piece by piece (in an age appropriate way, of course) the movie was no longer a threat, either to me, or to my kids.
This was what I suggested to my friend Mary: that she tell her kids, “You can listen to this song, but only after we talk about why I don’t like it.”
What’s to lose? At the very least, you might have a really good discussion!
3 comments
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March 22, 2009 at 4:54 am
QueenHoneyB
Sounds like a good tactic. I’m still not sure how I feel about the whole “Barbie” issue. I don’t think I grew up with any negative feelings about my body because of Barbie. I had some Barbies and me and my sisters played with them all the time. We also had Maxie dolls and Happy To Be Me dolls which we liked just as much. I do think it’s better to have dolls that represent what we look like more. I think the creator of Happy To Be Me dolls and GFive dolls had the right idea and I wish they had been more successful! It stinks that the BIG brands don’t leave any room for the better things just because they are big
Not sure how well this would work for playing with guns, though. I totally agree about having the discussion about WHY you don’t like toy guns. But I couldn’t let toy guns in my house. My mom didn’t allow it and my brothers never wanted them.
March 22, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Leanne
QueenHoneyB, you make some interesting and thought-provoking points. Barbie isn’t the sole cause of body image problems, she’s just a small part of a whole conglomerated media package wherein girls (and women!) are bombarded with pictures of perfect, thin women. And as a result, many of us (not all!) start to feel inadequate. A tiny tummy bulge is magnified into something MUCH larger. I speak from personal experience here. This is something I battle each day. I’m not “fat” by any healthy definition, and I’ve never had anorexia or bulemia, but that doesn’t stop me from looking in the mirror sometimes and sighing with disappointment at what I see. I try really hard not to, especially given everything I “know” to be true. But head and heart sometimes don’t see eye to eye.
Regarding guns – we had a long time ban on them as well. But last year (my son was 8), after it was clear to me that my son knew exactly why real guns were bad, and after he demonstrated to me the compassion to understand what damage real violence creates, we let him have a Nerf gun. He and my husband played Nerf tag, which for them was a fun game of hide and seek mixed with tag. They played together, they laughed, they bonded, and then they moved on to some other game. But I feel like if I had maintained the ban, he would have simply played with them at other kids’ houses. And when he did, it would have had an added dimension of titillation, just BECAUSE it was banned at home. Because we let him play with them to his hearts content, he’s completely lost interest in them.
The same with Barbie. My daughter inherited a large bin full of Barbie stuff, played with it for a while, then within 2-3 years, was ready to donate them to someone else.
Eckart Tolle pointed out that to the ego, the WANTING of something is much more powerful than the HAVING. My son demonstrates this daily. He had to have this really fancy, relatively expensive Nerf gun. Eventually, he had enough money and he bought it. He played with a few times, and less than a month later, he was ready to donate it. It’s never the object that makes him happy, it’s the wanting of the object. But so far, he hasn’t figured that out. But that’s a whole different topic!
March 22, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Leanne
Oh, and I never heard of – let alone had – Happy To Be Me dolls, Maxie dolls or GFive dolls. But I was a little girl a long time ago.