There’s a new doll entering the American toy market called The Breast Milk Baby. In addition to the doll, little girls (and boys) get a halter-top that they can wear, with two flowers that symbolize breasts.
As the doll’s mouth is brought to the flowers it makes a sucking sound, as if it is drinking milk. Afterwards, the doll cries until it is burped.
“The whole purpose behind a doll is to pretend like you’re a parent,” said Dennis Lewis, the American representative for Berjuan Toys, the Spanish company that makes the dolls. “The dolls are meant to just let kids play as mommies and daddies naturally.”
The company will not officially introduce the doll until a trade show in Las Vegas this weekend, though it has been sold in Europe. But already the doll has stirred up controversy here. Fox News host Bill O’Reilly declared the doll inappropriate for children. “I just want the kids to be kids,” he said. There’s even a Facebook page calling for a ban on the doll, though another Facebook page promoting the doll has far more fans.
The controversy brings up an interesting question about what sort of doll is appropriate. By letting little girls play with dolls that come with baby bottles — and there are many to choose from — are we conditioning them to think that the bottle is better than the breast?
“The question’s a legitimate one — it’s that whether we’re sending an implicit message to little girls,” said Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. “I think, though, you probably don’t have to worry; I don’t think it’s going to wind up swaying kids in either direction.”
Dr. Nelson said that while he was only speculating based on his own experience, he thinks that children will form their opinions based on what they see over many years, not from a single doll.
“Dolls are very important, and admittedly dolls can send certain messages. Barbie is the classic example, but there are a lot of other messages kids are getting from different places,” he said.
There are no scientific papers on The Breast Milk Baby, though the company says child psychologists, schoolteachers and mothers were involved in its development. But researchers have studied other dolls.
Last year, in a paper published in the journal Sex Roles, psychologists studied girls ages 6 to 10. Some were given thin dolls like Barbie to play with; others got dolls of average girth. Afterwards, the girls who had played with the thin dolls were likely to eat less food than those who had played with the average-sized dolls.
Joanna Koch, a lactation consultant at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area who works with mothers struggling with breast-feeding, is doubtful that playing with dolls with bottles has a long-term effect. “There’s so much more that goes into breast-feeding,” she said.
The percentage of mothers in the United States who exclusively breast-feed at three and six months, as recommended by the World Health Organization, remains low. Nationwide, although three out of four mothers breastfeed their babies at birth, only about 33 percent exclusively breast-feed at three months and 13.3 percent exclusively breast-feed at six months, according to a survey done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year.
In some states, the numbers are extremely low. In Kentucky, West Virginia, Mississippi and Louisiana, less than 60 percent of mothers have ever tried breast-feeding at all.
Some mothers might not have the time to breastfeed after they go back to work. Others simply can’t breast-feed for medical reasons, Ms. Koch said.
Ms. Koch said that in her experience, the decision to breast-feed comes from having access to research on its benefits. And, she added, women make the decision to breast-feed not when they are children, but as they begin to plan families and when they are pregnant.
While she sees the potential benefit in The Breast Milk Baby, she says it’s unlikely that it will catch on in America.
“If you take your 5-year-old out in public and she’s breast-feeding her baby doll, some would find it cute — I would find it adorable — and some would be shocked,” she said.
