Barbie Doll-- have we really changed since the 70s?

The poem “Barbie Doll” hit me hard on the second line, because in my childhood I was the very proudest owner of Potty Training Kelly. The “dolls that go pee-pee” from a poem written in 1971 are not so far away as we’d like to think. In 1971, my mother was seven years old, probably playing with her own potty training doll and pretend diapers. I wish I could say that she had been more progressive with me, but I was raised and potty trained like Kelly, and raised and potty trained my own Kelly doll. The way we stereotype male and female children comes from deeply rooted ideas about gender, sure, but haven’t we progressed since then? Perhaps not. We raise little girls by teaching them how to raise other little girls, reinforcing the beliefs about how they should act in their youth and adulthood. It’s not always permanent, and it’s not as rigid as the 70s may have been, but it’s there. Now I have a petrifying fear of raising children, but the persistent thought that I should has never left my mind because it was put into my head so early as part of what it meant to be a girl. I’ve done a lot of babysitting, and I’m happy to say that the little boys and girls I’ve taken care of are less formal about their gender roles, though I still see adults imposing it on them. My favorite kid, Collin, begged me to paint his nails and give him my lip gloss, and his mother adored it, but when he stayed the weekend with his grandmother the nail polish came off and he didn’t ask me to redo it. Collin loved trains and baby dolls, and brought them along to the bathroom while we worked on potty training, but he never thought of himself as the parent, like the little girls I have looked after usually did. His mother stayed at home, taking care of his infant sister (severely disabled, so she had to be supervised 24/7) and his father went to work (at his high-paying job, which he couldn’t leave like his mother could leave her teaching job) and though they each had tangible reasons for what they did, they were quite apparently staying with what their respective gender roles offered them. I can’t help but fear that even with different toys, with Collin’s sister playing with all his trucks and he tending to his babies, that we have not sufficiently created an environment for children to explore their identity as people or their gender identity as male, female or nonbinary. Collin is now in Cub Scouts and soccer, and from what I can tell, has grown into his identity as a young boy, but I hope it’s because he is truly comfortable that way and not because his grandma confiscated his lip gloss—and I sure hope the lip gloss hasn’t been handed off to his baby sister, either.

My favorite Barbie before I beheaded them all in a fit of rebellion. I liked to put yellow water in her bottle for realism. I was upset she didn't poop, like my rich friend's baby doll that ate and pooped plastic food.