Too many accessories lessen the educational value of this play in teaching children to put themselves in the parents’ place, in deepening love of children, and of motherhood. Children with French dolls incline to practice their little French upon them; can this tendency be utilized in teaching a foreign language to young children?...
The rudest doll has the great advantage of stimulating the imagination by giving it more to do than does the elaborately finished doll. It can also enter more fully into the child’s life, because it can be played with more freely without danger of being soiled or injured. With rude dolls, too, the danger both of hypertrophy and of too great prolongation of the doll instinct is diminished. The child’s interest is opposed to large, elegant French dolls which teach love of dress and suggest luxury, and dolls with too many mechanical devices, as for winking, walking, speaking, and singing, against which the Russian Toy Congress has so strongly protested. Rather small and durable dolls, soft enough not to hurt, flexible, with two or three colors and not more than two or three garments, along with plenty of hints regarding clothespins, flowers, and other varied material,—something like this seems to be the suggestion for a first doll, with increasing variation in size, material, elaborateness, and number till the doll passion vanishes in two dimensions, with innumerable paper dolls, towards adolescence.
That boys are naturally fond of and should play with dolls as well as girls, there is abundant indication. One boy in a family of girls, or boys who are only children, often play with dolls up to seven or eight years of age. It is unfortunate that this is considered so predominantly a girl’s play. Most boys abandon it early or never play, partly because it is thought girlish by adults as well as by children. Of course, boy life is naturally rougher and demands a wider range of activities. The danger, too, of making boy milliners is of course obvious, but we are convinced that, on the whole, more play with girl dolls by boys would tend to make them more sympathetic with girls as children, if not more tender with their wives and with women later. Again, boys as well as girls might be encouraged to play with boy dolls more than at present, with great advantage to both. Boys, too, seem to prefer exceptional dolls, clowns, brownies, colored, Eskimo, Japanese, etc. Boys, too, seem fonder than girls of monkey and animal dolls, and are often very tender of these, when they maltreat dolls in human shape. Again, dolls representing heroes of every kind and non-existent beings, dragons, and hobgoblins find their chief admirers among boys.
It seems to be about the age of six, three years before the culmination of the doll passion, that the conflict between fancy and reality becomes clearly manifest. Abandonment to the doll illusion and the length of the doll period decreases as dolls and their accessories become elaborate. With every increase of knowledge of anatomy or of the difference between living tissue and dead matter, between life and mechanism, this element of doll play must wane.
Tests of Good Toys
Lovable
Durable in composition and workmanship
Stimulating to imagination, analysis, invention, initiative, activity, workmanship
Adapted to experimentation, investigation or constructive purposes
Adapted to the child’s stage of development, viz., his motor ability, his interests, his mental development