Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [38]
Scholars agree that for children, "play" is "work." Jean Piaget has grouped children's play into three categories: games of mastery (building with blocks, climbing on jungle gyms), games with rules (checkers, hide-and-seek), and games of "make-believe," in which play involves a story that begins "What if. . ." Make-believe play is concerned with the manipulation of symbols and the exercise of imagination—and it is into this category that Barbie play falls.
To some scholars, toys and games are the Lego bricks in the social construction of gender. "When kids maneuver to form same-gender groups on the playground or organize a kickball game as 'boys-against-the-girls,' they produce a sense of gender as dichotomy and opposition," University of Southern California sociologist Barrie Thorne writes in Gender Play. "And when girls and boys work cooperatively on a classroom project, they actively undermine a sense of gender as opposition."
But the role of make-believe play is less clear than that of games of mastery or games with rules because it involves entering the logic (and occasionally illogic) of the child's imaginary world. Children sometimes use Barbie and Ken to dramatize relationships between the adults in their lives, especially if those adults are a source of anxiety. In Sarah Gilbert's novel Summer Gloves, the female narrator's daughter mutilates her Midge doll and practically glues her Ken to her Barbie. This seems odd until the mother comments: "I married a Ken and he's about to run off with a Midge. And they may good and well deserve each other, the bores."
Children's therapists even use Barbie and Ken—or the Heart family, Mattel's Barbie-sized domestic unit—to help their young patients communicate. "A lot of them act out their own problems with the Heart family," Yale University psychologist Dorothy G. Singer told me. "One child whose parents were going to be divorced would constantly lock Mr. Heart out of the dollhouse—make him sleep in the garden."
Singer is the author of Playing for Their Lives: Helping Troubled Children Through Play Therapy, and, with her husband, Yale psychologist Jerome L. Singer, of Make Believe: Games and Activities to Foster Imaginative Play in Young Children. She says that although some children use Barbie for creative play, it's not because the doll has—as Mattel's commercials contend— "something special." "Imaginative kids take some toys and make them into anything they want," she told me. "But you have to ask: Where does that imagination come from and how does it start? What we found in our research is that if the parent sanctions that kind of play—starts a game, helps—then by the time the child is four or five, [he or she] doesn't need the parent. They now have ideas for scripts and they can make any world that they want."
Not every parent is quite so willing to disappear. In her short story "The Geometry of Soap Bubbles," Rebecca Goldstein dramatizes the efforts of a mother—Chloe, a member of the classics department at Barnard College— to teach the art of make-believe to her daughter, Phoebe. In defiance of her colleagues' "finer sensibilities," Chloe presents the child with an array of Kens and Barbies, "having felt the drama latent in their flesh." Then she uses the dolls to act out mythological tales. In one scenario, Ken, "clad in psychedelic bathing trunks," becomes "the shining god Apollo"; Barbie, the clairvoyant princess Cassandra. In another, a corybantic adaptation of Euripides's Bacchae, Ken portrays Dionysus. Unfortunately, Chloe's strategy works too well: Instead of playing with the dolls, the daughter, who prefers math problems, asks her mother to play with them 'for her."
Even when mothers don't intervene actively, they can influence what their children do with the doll. During her daughter's Barbie years, Ann Lewis, Democratic party activist and sister of Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank,