….according to my six year old daughter Morgan.
So I’ve posted a couple posts already about Barbie, the last being one about identity formation among young girls especially. I thought I’d make it a third since my daughter keeps giving me good material.
I’ve been very honest with my daughter than I’m not a big fan of the Barbie movies. I’m not in total opposition, but just not super excited about the sorority vibe that these movies have as well as the general western beauty stereotypes.
But my daughter, the lawyer she is, has come back at me informing me that some of the movies are very good. I’ll quote her.
“Dad, some of the Barbie movies really are good. They teach you good things about being friends and life. One of the movies teaches you how to be friends again after you fight. That’s a good thing so you should let me watch that one all the time. So Barbie movies can be really good too.”
So there you go – my daughter is learning conflict resolution from Barbie movies and shrewdly defending why she should get to watch these movies. And as usual, she makes a very solid and logical point. Barbie movies, and most media, usually have at least one redeeming value – except spongebob maybe. But that doesn’t erase the overall affect over time in the absence of balancing images.
I don’t want to take a militant position on Barbie. Majority culture is going to do stuff and it’s going to reflect the majority culture most of the time. So on one hand it’s not “bad” in and of itself. But context is everything and there are plenty of girls out there who look different, are marginalized, or are invisible for a variety of reasons. Diversifying the role models isn’t just something to be “pc” in our culture today, but it’s about serving often unseen demographics and counteracting the lies that you have to be something else to be beautiful. There’s servanthood and even justice issues to be considered here.
This is something for people in media to continue to wrestle with for sure. But I think issues like this are key for parenting – whether you are majority culture or ethnic minority. The purposes may be slightly different in doing so, but exposing kids to a diversity of images and pictures of beauty and heroism can only help down the road. I’ve read some things on child development this week that reinforce that exposure to diversity young only helps integrate different viewpoints and perspectives down the road while maintaining a well developed self.
I can make decisions now and have conversations with my daughter that will affect her sense of self and her capacity to integrate multiple viewpoints years down the road. So it’s not about allowing or not allowing Barbie, but about being intentional to diversify and having the honest conversations where we can.
How might you go about investing into the developing self of a young girl as a parent in light of all of today’s influences?
