My daughter, Betty, has been throwing fits lately when I put her hair in two puffs. She cries and kicks and acts as if I’m torturing her. Part of me, wants to say, “You want to talk about painful kid? Try get your hair pressed with an iron hotcomb, and having your mom slip and burn your ear! Until you’ve had hot grease sizzling on your scalp, do not even try to act like I’m even halfway hurting you — which BTW, I’m not. You’re just tender-headed and acting a straight fool.”
Sadly, Betty only has a two-word vocabulary and isn’t quite ready for the tried and true method of comparing your old-timey childhood to your child’s relatively easy one. So I did some research, and the internets suggested modeling the activity on a doll, so that your child can be made to understand that it’s fun to not leave the house looking a hot mess.
Simple enough solution, but now here comes the question of what kind of doll to get. This is where being the mother of a biracial kid gets a bit tricky. My MIL purchased a stuffed white baby doll for her last Christmas, and I counterbalanced it with a stuffed black baby doll. Betty likes both dolls. She sleeps with the black one and plays with the white one in her playpen. However, this got me to wondering if I’d just have to buy her two dolls at every stage of the development game, one black and one white so that she doesn’t think that one is better than the other. Also, neither a black nor a white doll is great for the hair modeling business. I assume that this doll should at least look a little bit like her.
So I started putting some research into purchasing a biracial doll for Betty, and I found quite a few blog posts by frustrated moms of biracial daughters, looking for the same thing but only able to find pricey wonders like this $100 doll. And quite a few of these posts were from 2010. Sigh…
Got any thoughts, advice, or solutions? I could use the help.