Giving Attachment Parenting Toys This Holiday Season

The other day, I took my daughter, Ayla, out with her baby doll.  My daughter is a cutie, (and especially adorable when she’s wearing her wig) so she gets lots of attention when she’s out. She gets even more attention though, when she’s out playing Mommy.  With Christmas just around the corner, I want to touch on the subject of allowing the toys our daughters get this season to have the dual function of being fun and promoting good maternal values.

To me, Ayla’s baby doll isn’t just a toy, it’s a learning tool.  We don’t toss baby dolls on the ground. We don’t step on baby dolls. We hold baby dolls nicely, we talk to them kindly, and we wear them!  My daughter, Ayla, is the proud owner of a Mini-Moby. She loves babywearing and she is becoming quite good at understanding how they tie… a trait I hope extends out into her adult mothering years.

Our little girls are going to be bombarded by social norms throughout their lives. During these formative years we have the best chance of teaching them how to mother in a natural and nurturing way.  I want babywearing to be like second nature to my daughter. I want her to know how healthy carriers work, so that she doesn’t have to go through the learning process as an adult (like I did) to become skilled at using one.

There are tools available to us to teach our daughters to mother the way we hope that they will. There is even an amazing breastfeeding doll that was designed to stand up against the thousands of bottle-fed dolls on the market. Guess, what? People love this doll. It gets put on sold-out status all the time!

Sometimes the dolls come out of the package with disposable diapers. I suppose I could let her use them, after all it’s just play right? No! It’s learning, and I want her to learn with cloth diapers! Often she puts her own Fuzzi Bunz on her dolls, but they of course are much too big. The solution for little girls is to get them cloth diapers for premature babies.  These fit perfectly on baby dolls.  Whether they are home-made or if  Santa delivers some gorgeous new Happy Heinys Micro Mini this season, this is a fantastic gift idea. Either way, it will get our little girls excited about cloth diapers.  Besides, we all know that Santa loves getting fluff from Everything Birth!

-Dawn P.