In his short essay The Philosophy of Toys, Charles Baudelaire penned one of the earliest attempts to understand children’s relationships with dolls. Published in 1853, he asks: what is it exactly that children are doing with their toys and what are they getting from it? He writes: “All children talk to their toys; the toys become actors in the great drama of life.” Yet, he is puzzled by the compulsion to both decorate dolls and destroy them.

Ultimately, he failed to find any answers - but have we done any better in the intervening 160 or so years? The short answer is yes. Sarah Gerson, a researcher at Cardiff University, thinks we now have good evidence to suggest playing with dolls has some seriously positive effects for childhood development and learning.

Gerson has spent more than 10 years looking at the relationship between children and play, and in particular at how imaginative play with dolls helps children to develop an understanding of the world around them. Doll play, she explains, is a key facet of learning to be social: in a series of experiments from October last year, her team demonstrated that the part of the brain that handles “social processing … thinking about other people’s thoughts, understanding other people’s emotions, things like empathy” was just as active when playing with dolls as it was when playing with other children.

“When children are playing alone with dolls,” Gerson explains, “they can recreate [their] social worlds, so they practise these social interactions that they do when they’re actually interacting with another person, and that seems unique” compared with other kinds of play.

Hierarchy of play

Brain scans suggest that dolls are crucial to the socioemotional learning that is so pivotal to the early years of schooling and on into adult life. This is backed by evidence from different types of studies. For example, it can also be seen in research looking at children’s “internal state language”, or ISL. This is where children begin to recognise their emotions, intentions and compulsions, and articulate those states for themselves and for others. Gerson says that dolls can play a vital role in the development of this language.

“You can imagine if [the child] is playing with two dolls and they say something about one doll being mad at the other, or one is jealous that the other doll has a toy or something, that’s all about what’s happening in the heads - or the imaginary heads - of those dolls, and that’s what we think children are practising,” she explains.

But is this role of dolls in childhood development always recognised in schools and early years settings to the degree it should be? Salim Hashmi works at King’s College London and has recently completed his PhD on the relationship between children, toys of different kinds and the neuroscience of social development.

He suggests that “play in general, in any of its different ways of being, has, for a long time, been considered important for really quite a lot of aspects of children’s development. Dolls, in particular, have been thought of as quite beneficial because they’re humanlike”.

However, he feels there is a hierarchy of play in people’s minds that understates the importance of play with dolls. He is keen to advocate that dolls have an important place in play time, offering children valuable insight into relationships and emotions on a par with the more constructive learning based around Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths), such as Lego, puzzles or problem solving. These other types of play gain prominence, he argues, as they are more explicitly related to academic ends in the minds of adults.

What this can lead to, says Gerson, is an attempt by adults to structure doll play to make up for what they feel it lacks. This, she says, is the wrong approach.

For children to get the most out of dolls, she explains, it’s important that teachers and caregivers allow children to play with dolls without any strings attached. It’s about giving children opportunities to play with dolls “without necessarily telling them what to do with them”, she says.

Benefits for boys

Also important, she stresses, is that every person working with children recognises that dolls are equally beneficial for boys and girls. Research has demonstrated that while most children won’t be able to articulate a strong sense of their gender identity until they are 3 to 5 years old, many will experience a gendering of their social experience from their caregivers. This often includes girls being directed towards dolls and boys towards Lego and cars.

Hashmi points out that denying boys the chance to play with dolls, or not actively presenting them with opportunities, could have a long-term impact on their development of ISL and, as such, on their levels of empathy, emotional regulation and social dialogue.

That’s not to say that young boys “won’t develop these skills in other ways”, says Hashmi, but it may limit the opportunities they have to do so.

And a final consideration, when it comes to dolls, is an audit of how diverse your current dolls in school are, in type and appearance.

Because dolls are humanlike, there should be a focus on variety in physical representation: size, age, ability, race, gender and so on. Children can play only with the toys they are given, so if caregivers provide nothing but white female dolls, this may influence how much a boy or a child of colour wants to play with them or how they play with them.

In addition, a recent study in Israel, which Gerson plans to explore further in her next piece of research, suggests that the physical appearance of dolls can elicit preferential treatment from children who share that appearance, while introducing a doll from a different social “group” can encourage positive attitudes towards people of that group.

Press play

Another focus for variety should be the media through which dolls are accessed. While some adults may see devices and screens as a distraction from “proper” play or learning, Hashmi’s key message is to support children to play with whatever dolls they like, including via screens, because children explore imaginative play in a host of ways, be it with a Barbie, a toy with a face drawn on or a video-game avatar.

“Children can be playing in different ways, they can be acting in a ‘play’, taking on roles, being the dolls, they could just be completely managing it … the children who are storytelling may be doing a hybrid of all of it,” he explains.

Moreover, Hashmi’s recent work suggests that this benefit can be seen regardless of whether the doll is a physical doll or a character on a screen. Having recently completed a PhD exploring play with video games versus Playmobil, Hashmi emphasised that the virtual worlds of video games can serve very similar purposes to the imagined worlds of dolls that children create.

Ultimately, in whatever form they take, Gerson wants to see dolls taken more seriously within the education system. She hopes that further study of children and dolls will yield more interesting results to make an even more convincing case.

“People have studied pretend play, imaginary play, construction play, but doll play hasn’t really been studied that extensively, so it’s a really rich area for looking at what children are doing with it and what they could learn from it.”

Molly Bolding is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 17 September 2021 issue under the headline “Tes focus on...Playing with dolls”