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Good role models for young people
Impact of toys on child development
Whats the influence of role models on young children
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Recommended: Good role models for young people
Children need to have good role models to look up to. A good role model includes being ambitious and doing good deeds. Most little girls look up to the doll named Barbie. The doll has played a very important roll in many childhoods. She was introduced in the 50’s and manufactured by Mattel. Barbie is an up beat character and is always up to date on the latest trends. She has long blonde hair, beautiful blue eyes that go with her perfect makeup, and is tied all together by her medium tanned curvacious body. Barbie is portrayed as being the girl that everyone wants to be or at least be around. Barbie has a boyfriend named Ken and a little sister named Skipper. Over the years many dolls have been introduced as Barbie’s friends as well as several different ethnicities, cultures, religions, disabilities, and even mythical dolls such as mermaids. She first started out as a fashion designer and as time has gone by the doll is now marketed as having all types of careers from being a barista all the way to being a doctor. The doll typically comes with an extra outfit and accessories. Mattel even sells dream houses and many different cars for Barbie. She has a book club that sends books out monthly and here recently started coming out with straight to DVD movies. I get a Barbie magazine every month that sells designer Barbies that are based of celebrities and movie characters. The last magazine I got I was surprised to see a Barbie with tattoos and her own motorcycle. Her job is to promote happiness, success, and inspire little girls all over the world. All of these things sound like a perfectly reasonable children’s toy so why are some countries banning the doll?
Barbie has been banned in a few countries for her revealin...
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...elves. I will gladly let them have Barbie dolls but only if I see that they are mentally fit to have them. In the future, maybe the media will see the impact it is having on our youth and change for the better. I don’t see that happening anytime soon but I will do all I can to keep my children from being confused about who they are.
Works Cited
"The Negative Effects of Barbie on Young Girls and the Long Term Results." Divine Caroline. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 May 2014. .
"The Barbie Effect." Teen Ink. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 May 2014. .
"Bleeding Blue & White." Bleeding Blue White. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 May 2014. .
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Martin Luther King Jr. knew it was better to speak up than to stay quiet. This is a lesson that needs to be taught throughout both middle schools and high schools. All around the world, suicide rates are going up, and most of these cases relate back to bullying. The children often do not say anything because they are afraid the bullying will only get worse. When nothing changes, they are driven to suicide to relieve the pain that they are feeling. As Marge Piercy examines in “Barbie Doll,” students are picked on for being or looking different than others. No matter what type of bullying it may be, it hurts people more than they are willing to let on. All forms of bullying, whether it be in schools, physical, verbal, or online, have an impact on teen suicide ideation.
In the beginning of “Barbie Doll”, pleasurable and unpleasurable imagery is given so that the reader can see the extremes girls go through to be considered perfect.
Bratz Dolls came about in 2001 by MGA Entertainment. The 4 dolls are Yasmin, Cloe, Jade, and Sasha. These dolls are known to be unrealistic, unproportional, and inappropriate depictions of young girls. The American Psychological Association feels that the Bratz doll could even be considered worse that the Barbie doll because of the clothes that Bratz dolls wear. The average consumer of a Bratz doll is a girl around the age of eight. Bratz dolls give young girls an impossible, extremely unrealistic idea of how they and all women should look to be successful.
Every woman grows up knowing that they one day want to be beautiful. In Marge Piercy’s “Barbie Doll” she gives an in depth look at what negative effects the concept of beauty can have on an individual. From infancy to a full grown adult woman, beauty has been a way of thinking and lifestyle. As a little girl you are given petite shaped, blonde, blue eyed dolls. While boys are given brawny soldiers and mechanical toys.
In the Article “Barbie Doesn’t Add Up,” the author Ken Schroeder states that Barbie dolls were just dolls that gave young girls false ideas of what they should be and look like as they get older. This article was written in the Education Digest in 1992, which helps understand why the author talks mostly about Barbie’s intelligence. The main audience of this article is directed towards parents of young girls in particular. The author is not very persuasive in the article about Barbie because he does not give enough legitimate examples and proof that his theory is correct. Also he is not in any type of field work that studies how children grow up to be after playing with Barbie. It is hard to find many credible examples to back up Mr. Schroeder’s views and thoughts on Barbie and how she makes girls think they should not be good at math.
“If Barbie was designed by a man, suddenly a lot of things made sense to me,” says Emily Prager in her essay “Our Barbies, Ourselves” (Prager 354). Prager’s purpose for writing this essay is to explain the history of Barbie and how the doll itself has influenced and continue to influence our society today. Prager is appealing to the average girl, to those who can relate to the way she felt growing up with Barbie seen as the ideal woman. Emily Prager uses a constant shift between a formal and informal tone to effectively communicate her ideas that we view women today based upon the unrealistic expectations set forth by Barbie. By adopting this strategy she avoids making readers feel attacked and therefore
Barbie's image through the shape of her body and all of her accessories is beginning to lead to many issues in our world. Barbie is portraying a negative impact on society through her influential being as a plastic doll. In 1965 the slumber party package was on the market showing buyers how straight forward she is with her products and accessories. The package had all of the normal slumber party things like a robe, comb, and hair rollers but it also had a weight scale set at a permanent weight of "110" and a disturbing book on weight loss that read in all caps, "DON'T EAT." This package is an example of how misleading Barbie and her products really are because it is implying to children that they should not eat and that if they grow up
Martin, Melanie. “Negative Effects of Barbie on Girls.” eHow. Demand Media, n.d. Web. 14 Feb. 2014.
It was very common to have a Barbie doll growing up, and it wasn’t just a toy, it was a representation of a “perfect life”. From dream houses, to boats, cars, a perfect boyfriend to exiting careers, Barbie had the perfect life. Barbie had the perfect lifestyle AND the perfect body, long legs, small waist and a curvy chest. This taught children from a very young age that having a boyfriend, a career, a house and a petite body is very important. (Worldpress 2011). Barbie’s “attention has been generated by the secondary role she plays in popular culture the artifact of female representation” (Wright 2003). Barbie isn’t just a toy, she mimics
It would be logical to ban Barbie. A psychology experiment in 2006 in the United Kingdoms tested 162 girls between the ages of 5-8 to assess how girls view their body image. They discovered those exposed to Barbie had produced “lower self-esteem and a greater desire for a thinner body shape.” (Hoskins) By being exposed to Barbie at a young age, later effects can trigger diseases in girls. Heidi Montag is an example of how Barbie has impacted her life. She has undergone 21 surgeries her own quest for “perfection.”
The majority of toys that little girls played with a hundred years ago were toys that dealt with the home. Miniature tea sets and rag dolls protrayed a girl’s future life and mimicked her mother’s behavior. Barbie was not created quite yet, the sexy image and revealing clothing would be offensive, even immoral, when girls were supposed to stay home and take care of the children.
Those perfect days as a child when your countless days were filled with playtime. The time to set up those houses and dress the dolls up, and act out the future. “Through their play Barbara imagined their lives as adults. They used the dolls to reflect the adult world around them. They would sit and carry on conversations, making the dolls real people” (Ruth Handler). As a young child, it is all you look forward to in your future: being successful and confident, loved and cherished. Many dolls were used to project this. Specifically, the Barbie. Barbie is a positive role model girl should look up to for confidence and inspiration. She is a talented and educated career woman, self-sufficient in every aspect of her life, and a stunning example to young girls the body that is healthy and fit.
Although there are many Americans that believe that Barbie should be banned because of her negative influence, research clearly shows that the Barbie doll brings children no harm. Barbie dolls are good for society because little girls have understood the diversity through the use of Barbie’s ethnic different. Little girls enjoy playing with this doll. Barbie, therefore, should not be banned. It’s time to drop the controversy about Barbie and accept the fact that she is just a Barbie.
Since the beginning of time, toys have often been an indicator of the way a society behaves, and how they interact with their children. For example, in ancient Greece, artifacts recovered there testify that children were simply not given toys to play with as in the modern world. The cruel ritual of leaving a sick child on a hillside for dead, seems to indicate a lack of attention to the young (Lord 16). The same is true of today’s society. As you can see with the number of toy stores in our society, we find toys of great value to our lives and enjoy giving them to children as gifts. Ask just about any young girl what she wants for Christmas and you’ll undoubtedly get the same answer: “A Barbie.” But what exactly has caused this baby boomer Barbie craze, and how did the entire world get so caught up in it? The answer lies in Ruth Handler’s vision for the first children’s adult doll. Mrs. Handler’s eleven and one-half-inch chunk of plastic began causing problems even before it’s public debut in 1959, yet has managed to become one of America’s favorite dolls.
... not be capable of walking around or holding her head up. However, this has not stopped women from trying to emulate her, leading to eating disorders and plastic surgeries. Barbie is also an icon of racial insensitivity. Mattel, Inc. has produced at least two Barbies with negative connotations in their name, such as “Colored” and “Oreo.” Additionally, their new “ethnic” line consists of Barbies from across the globe that fulfills a number of stereotypes. Lastly, Barbie encourages goals that are, for the most part, unobtainable. She is a doctor, surgeon, and jet pilot among many other professions, but also encourages stereotypical domestic activities like baking and cleaning. Barbie, a doll manufactured by Mattel, Inc., encourages an unrealistic body image, racial insensitivity, and contradictive goals, and it is having a negative influence on young girls everywhere.