A bit of a rant.
A few days ago, I was reading a post on Reddit asking fathers of daughters what they had learned about women from raising their daughters.
One dad responded that he had learned a lot from witnessing his pre-school aged daughter playing with her Barbie doll. He said that the head of her doll had come off and she started crying. Dad put the doll back together, but was bewildered that his daughter continued to cry even though her doll was fixed. So he hugged her and comforted her until she stopped crying. He said that what he’d learned about women was that they didn’t want their problems fixed, that they just wanted to be comforted.
This bugs me because I feel like this dad missed something pretty important. Of course, it’s probably not fair to expect that all adults should be able to think like kids. But if you can think like kids, it’s easy to realize why that little girl was crying.
When Dad saw that broken Barbie doll, what he saw was a thing that was broken that could easily be fixed. But to the little girl, the doll wasn’t just a thing. To a little kid, a doll can seem a lot like a little person - especially if she’s had the doll for a long time and she’s grown attached to it. After all, it’s got a human face, and an (arguably) human body, and when the girl plays with it, it talks and becomes real. And this little girl had just seen what it looked like without a head.
Can you imagine seeing an image of a person you know without a head? That can be as scary to a kid as it would be for an adult to see a person you know with a wound or an injury. Even if they can get fixed in the hospital, that image can be terrifying, even haunting. I’m guessing this girl had never seen what a Barbie looked like without a head - with that little knob on top of its neck - that it shattered the illusion that the doll was a little person, and made it look just like a manufactured thing.
And what could be even scarier for that little girl, was that her dad had seen the same thing she had - this precious doll with its head off its body - and he didn’t care. What’s more, he didn’t seem to understand why it was so scary for her. Imagine how disillusioning THAT can be for a little girl - learning that her dad never saw her doll as a person the same way she did - him seeing something as surreal and gory as a headless doll and acting like nothing was wrong.
Like I said earlier, I understand that it’s not easy for a grown-up to think like a little kid. I imagine it might even be frustrating for an adult to learn how his or her kid is seeing a situation in a way that’s so different from how they see it - especially if that way doesn’t make sense to them, or feels primitive or ignorant, or if it feels like something they themselves were taught not to feel a long time ago. This dad may not have wanted his daughter to see the doll as a person, because after all, it isn’t - so why acknowledge her behaving as though it is?
Going back to what bothered me about how the dad saw the situation, there were two things that happened. In both cases, the dad saw a problem, and went straight to looking for the solution.
Problem: Doll’s head broken -> fix head -> problem solved.
Problem: Daughter crying -> fix doll -> problem not solved -> comfort daughter -> problem solved.
What bothers me is that the dad didn’t bother to wonder why the kid felt the way she did - he only wanted to know how to make her feel better. I personally think it’s much more important to be able to understand where a kid’s coming from, and be able to understand and respect their perspective - because that helps them to honor and respect their own feelings, too. If they can do that, it would help them to honor and respect their own perspectives as they grow up, too.
“Someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.” -Granny Aching