Waldorf in the Home

I'm old enough to have been lucky enough to have the original Barbies. And when I was a kid you had one Barbie and lots of clothes. Nowadays Barbie is pretty trashy and you have to buy a new Barbie doll for every new outfit! The clothes are cheap and trashy, no real zipers, buttons, etc. It's all velcro and synthetic. I had to get rid of Barbie in my daughter's world so we told her if she sold them in a garage sale she could buy a big girl bike. It worked!

And when I was a kid, we got Barbie when we were 8 years old, well that woudl have been 1961, so maybe it was even older...10 years old? We spent hours and hours playing with Barbie, Midge, Skipper and Ken. I wish my daughter could have had the fun of Barbie at an older age like I did but you won't catch a 10 year old playing Barbie now!

I still have my old Barbies and they are worth a lot of money....the clothes are worth more than the dolls! Too bad Barbie had to become a tramp!

Karen

You bring up an interesting point, that I was also aware of: it's become "uncool" to play with Barbie dolls past the age of eight. Yet another example of things coming (and going) at ever-younger ages! --Rahima

I remember giving a lecture one time in Tulsa,

Oklahoma. At the end, a mother sitting on the front row raised her hand with tears in her eyes and,lowering her head, made her confessional that her daughter had a Barbie doll. Now, the interesting thing is that I had not even mentioned Barbie dolls in my lecture. She was obviously feeling like the world's worst mother (familiar feeling to anyone?)because she had allowed her daughter to keep a Barbie doll that had been given to her by relatives.

When I asked her how her daughter played with her

doll, she began to describe a beautiful picture of tenderness and care, similar to how many children care for their baby dolls. Her daughter would dress up her doll, wrap it in a blanket, rock it and sing to it, and put it into a baby bed at night. She had invested love and devotion toward this doll, oblivious to any of the cultural ills attached to the style, form,

brand or genre.

My guess is that this is an exceptional story, but it is an important one. I suggested to this mother that her daughter's love for her doll was special and important and could actually cause more harm than good to take it away from her. When the child shows signs of losing interest or transitioning toward something else, that might be a good time to replace Barbie. But as long as this particular Barbie was receiving such redemptive care, best to be grateful that her

daughter could express such tenderness.

Like many of you, I also did not get my Barbie until I was around ten (1960), and there was no way she could replace my maternal extincts toward my baby doll whom I loved up to my teens (in fact, I still have it). My grandmother made Barbie's clothes, so the fun for me was dressing her up. Mine was a rare Barbie with bobbed red hair!! But despite that and her homespun clothes, Ken loved her anyway!!

Cynthia Aldinger

This is a posting on "Being a Waldorf Family in Less than Idea Circumstances" from our weblog, http://happygardeners.blog.com/125437/

We found that living in a far from Waldorf community we had to make concessions on some things, or our lovely daughter never would have had a single friend! There were no other children with handmade dolls, no other children listening to simple Grimm's or folk tales at story time, no other children learning about gnomes and fairies in the garden, no other children who were even learning the wealth of nursery rhymes and finger plays that we were enjoying at home. We found we had to make some decisions about what we might compromise on so that our daughter could enjoy friendships with local children.

This was very tough as we found children with computer games at home, children with robot puppies with mechanized/computerized barks, children with power puff girls or Disney marketed characters comprising most of their play figurines at home and we did not want to concede in those areas.

So we made a very tough decision, and decided we would allow Barbie in our house. For us this was the compromise, as Barbie doesn't really have movies or tv shows with a script that might dictate play, so in a sense she could still be a vehichle for imaginative free play. Barbie didn't have mechanized parts or even make any noise, so our daughter would still have to speak and move Barbie. And most importantly, all of our daughter's friends had Barbies at home, so it was a point we could all agree upon.

What we found was that the other pieces of what we were bringing (handmade toys of natural materials allowing for free play, introduction to the elementals, fairy & folk tales to enliven the imagination and speak to the soul, celebrating the festivals) protected our daughter enough that she could live into her Barbie free play and still maintain a place for what we hold dear too. Today the Barbies receive far less play time than the handmade dolls...

Leeann Rolph