Reference no: EM133670407

What toys did you have as a child that you think of as agents of socialization and how did you use the toys to understand relationships, or prepare for new ones?

As depicted in Galimberti's Toy Stories, girls mostly play with girl toys like teddy bears and dolls while boys played with boy toys like cars and Legos and as a child, I was not an exception. I grew up playing mostly with dolls, especially Barbie. I had the Barbie doll, Barbie doll house, and even a Barbie jeep. I always saw advertisements of girls playing with these toys so I would beg my mom to buy me them. While growing up in the early 2000s, I remember there use to be a competition between Barbie and Bratz and although I had both dolls, I always thought Barbie was better. To me, Barbie was the white, skinny blonde that was advertised as being rich and successful and always had huge houses and fancy cars with it while Bratz were the diverse crowd with accentuated features advertised as being sassy and trendy with an undertone of rebel. As a black girl that grew up in a predominantly white area, these dolls really enforced the social stereotype that being white meant being superior to other races and this ideology really affected me. I would always want my hair to be straight like Barbie and I would want to dress like her too. In that time, there was only one Barbie type, so having her be a skinny blonde woman caused me to have an identity crisis because there was nothing else for me to look up to for reference so I would secretly wish I was white when I was younger. I often played dolls by myself so I did not have any parental guidance to hinder these thoughts from occurring but when black Barbie became more popular, it made me realize that not being white was also okay and that led me to embrace my Bratz dolls more. Overall, I think the dolls contributed a lot to class and racial stigmas and made me more aware of these issues in society. However playing with these dolls and dollhouses did teach me the basics about family dynamics and what having a spouse could potentially look like.