Cherry Xu

After coming across Jennifer Langston’s article, “Is the world ready for a baby doll that breast-feeds?”, I think a new doll that encourages little girls(or boys) to pretend to breast-feed is too much for their age.

This new product is a doll that allows kids to pretend to breast feed. Here is the doll’s website, it includes this video on how the works. From the video we can see that “a little girl straps on a halter with pink flowers over the nipple areas, lets the baby slurp away and burps it”. The marketers are obviously targeting little girls (or boys). However, little kids are not capable of walking into a store to pick their toys and pay at the cashier. Their parents are doing all that jobs for them, which means that marketers’ target market should be the parents rather than the kids. Therefore, parents’ thoughts of the toys should be taken into consideration as well. Have the marketers of the breast-feed baby doll ever done a survey on how parents view their newest product beforehand? Probably not- here is a video on how some moms think this product is. 

After the doll has launched, there are tons of negative comments like-“why would a little girl need to learn how to breast-feed before she has breasts?” and etc.

Just like Jennifer said, “this is just a toy. Kids love to mimic things they see adults doing.” I remember when I was a kid, I love brushing hair for my Barbie, I love making cupcakes for my doll, and I love changing clothes for them. However, in my opinion, pretend to breast-feed would be too much because kids are too young for it, kids don’t even know what breast feed mean and how it works. “The manufacture goes on suggest the doll may help the U.S. toward greater acceptance of breast feeding.” Frankly, why do little kids have to be educated to accept breast feeding when they are so little? There is no point to educate them when they are babies.