All My Children

There are many contributions that only parents can make to their child’s play. For example, no teacher, and certainly no age-mate, can be as deeply and personally involved in play that seems to relate to the child’s future as are his parents. Play is anchored in the present, but it also takes up and tries to solve problems of the past, and it is often future-directed as well. So a girl’s doll play anticipates her possible future motherhood and also helps her to deal with emotional pressures of the moment. If she should be jealous of the care a sibling receives from their mother, doll play permits her to act out and master her ambivalent feelings. She deals with their negative aspects by mistreating the doll, who represents her sibling. In this symbolic way, she can punish her sibling for her jealous agonies, of which he or she is the innocent cause. She can make amends for her negative attitudes to her sibling and satisfy the positive elements of her ambivalence when she takes good care of the doll, just as mother does of the sibling, and in this way free herself of guilt and identify with her mother. In addition, the girl also identifies with the doll, and thus vicariously receives the care her mother lavishes on the sibling. Thus in a myriad of ways doll play is most closely connected with a girl’s relation to her mother.

It is a misfortune for boys that they are only rarely offered opportunities to play with dolls and even more rarely encouraged to engage in it. Many parents feel that doll play is not for boys, and because of this they are usually prevented from dealing with issues such as sibling rivalry and problems of family constellation (among many others) in this convenient symbolic way. Perhaps if parents could see how eagerly boys use dolls and doll houses in psychoanalytic treatment—certainly as eagerly and persistently as girls do— to work out family problems and anxieties about themselves, they would be more ready to recognize the value of doll play for both sexes. For example, in dollhouse play, boys—as eagerly as girls—put a figure representing their sibling out of the house, put a figure representing a parent on the roof or lock it into the basement, place the parents together in bed, seat a figure representing themselves on the toilet or have it mess up the house, and in countless ways visualize, act out, become able thus to deal better with pressing family problems.

When given the freedom to do so, both boys and girls use dolls to great advantage in working through unsolved problems; they reenact experiences from the recent past or from infancy, or fantasy experiences they wish they’d had, or cope with whatever other residues of the past they need to master. Some parents, especially fathers, think that doll play is contrary to masculinity, which it is not. There is a great deal in a boy’s past experience (just as there is in a girl’s), such as the way he was fed, held, bathed, or-toilettrained, which he can best master through doll play or play with dollhouse furniture, such as tubs and toilets. There are for him, too, present problems such as sibling rivalry. And while child care will probably not play as central a role in his future as in that of a girl, it may be a very important aspect of his life as a father.

If parents are worried that doll play may feminize a boy, all they need for reassurance is to watch how boys play with dolls, because it is very different from the way girls play with them. Unless a boy has already embraced femininity by reason of severe neurosis, he does not handle dolls or play with them as a girl does. His approach is quite distinctly masculine, typically much more aggressive and manipulative than that of girls.

True, boys‘ doll play is usually shorter-lived than girls‘, and not quite as significant an experience for them; but this is no reason that they should lose out entirely on what it can offer them. Actually, toys viewed as typical for boys, while they may offer a chance for working out problems of the present and anticipating the future, are much less suitable than dolls for mastering difficulties of the past. If parents feel relaxed about their son’s playing with dolls, they will provide him with valuable opportunities for enriching his play life. For this to happen, it is not sufficient that parents simply refrain from disparaging such play; because of the still-prevalent attitude that doll play is only for girls, both parents need to feel positively about a boy’s doll play, if he is to be able to take full advantage of it.

Today, when it is relatively rare for a parent to become as engrossed in the same play activity as his child does, there are still toys which evoke deep feeling in a parent, as they do in a child. Dolls are probably the best example of this.

Whether a mother merely watches her daughter play with dolls, encourages her in it, or actively participates, she is often deeply involved on many levels. She may reexperience aspects of her own childhood doll play and her own mother’s involvement in such play and in herself, simultaneously feeling what it now means to be the mother of a little girl who plays with dolls. The child as she plays with her doll feels in some way the strong emotions which reign in her mother’s conscious and subconscious mind, and experiences a closeness to her mother based on the deep emotional involvement they both have in the girl’s doll play. This closeness gives the play a special significance and depth of meaning for the child which it never could attain without the mother’s involvement. The mother need not be always physically present, nor when she is present must she be so personally involved on many levels; it is enough if the child carries a mental image of her mother’s involvement. One such experience with her mother can make such a lasting impact that the child will carry this image within her and reactivate it whenever she plays with her doll—it is that meaningful. She will continue to react to the emotional signals she has received from her mother and combine them in her doll play with other feelings which originate in her own past and present experiences of being mothered and playing at mothering. Important as her feelings are about being mothered and about someday becoming a parent herself, her doll play could not attain the same depth of meaning if her mother had not been on occasion deeply and personally involved because of the recollections it evoked in her.

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