Whenever I see a Barbie, I’m instantly back in the 90s and breathlessly ripping open Christmas and birthday presents to find Sparkle Beach, Olympic Gymnast, and Cut n’ Style Barbies or Disney’s Aladdin, and Jasmine dolls. I would spend hours changing their outfits and styling their hair, pulling at their little rubbery heads until their plastic necks cracked and heads snapped off. But, when I could, I’d pop their heads back on and keep playing with them until another birthday or holiday came along and brought me a new set of dolls. 

Standing in Nordstrom a few months ago, somewhere between the kids’ clothing section and rows of baby strollers, I felt that small wave excitement again. I set my eyes on a set of four dolls that made up the Barbie Eco-Leadership Team, which included a Conservation Scientist, Renewable Energy Engineer, Chief Sustainability Officer, and Environmental Advocate. 

I would have loved these dolls just as much as I loved Workin’ Out Barbie or My Size Barbie. However, my Barbies weren’t defined by their imagined occupations, rather I used them to reenact storylines swirling about in my head: the meet cutes in romcoms, love triangles on soap operas I’d watch on summer afternoons, and other drama I’d seen on my favorite tv shows, movies, or books.

Playing with dolls supports children’s development of their own storytelling skills. According to The Guardian, a 2021 study revealed that playing with dolls helped kids develop their  “theory of mind,” which in psychology refers to a person’s ability to understand their emotional state as well as that of others, abilities which help kids develop their empathy and social skills.

Through monitoring their brain activity, the researchers found that kids who played with dolls showed signs of internal state language (or the ability to speak about others’ thoughts and emotions). An early sign of perspective-taking necessary not only for developing social relationships but also storytelling. 

“When children create imaginary worlds and role play with dolls, they communicate at first out loud and then internalize the message about others’ thoughts, emotions and feelings,” said Dr Sarah Gerson, a neuroscientist at Cardiff University and the lead author of the study’s report. “This can have positive long-lasting effects on children, such as driving higher rates of social and emotional processing and building social skills like empathy that can become internalized to build and form lifelong habits.”

How we play with dolls can be a reflection of how we understand others’ emotions and expectations, and often it can reveal how we internalize pre-existing narratives of girlhood and body image and how we perform race, gender, and domesticity, as evidenced in the “Doll Test”.

However, as Robin Berstein writes in Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011), playing with dolls has also been a way for kids to rebel against those narratives and create their own stories. 

The Barbie was invented for that very reason, according to the backstory of its invention. Before Barbie,  most dolls looked like young children or babies, and Ruth Handler, co-founder with her husband of Mattel, Inc., wanted a doll that looked like an adult woman so that little girls like her daughter could imagine their futures.

And that’s what my little multiracial collection of Barbies meant to me. It was through playing with dolls that I first became a storyteller, where I imagined myself beyond the life I was living to be part and control a larger, more colorful story.