The Barbie Effect: How Barbie Affects Her Body

The Barbie Effect

As a parent, giving your little girl the Barbie doll that she has always wanted for her fifth birthday seems like a harmless gesture at the time, but what most parents don’t realize is that Barbie often effects the way a young girl perceives her body. What many parents don’t think about is that when these young girls are playing with their brand new Barbie doll, their brain is registering everything about that doll. How popular and perfect she is, so naturally these girls are beginning to want to be just like Barbie, which starts many of them on their way to eating disorders. (Wanless 2001) Barbie is not all about her weight though. She is also known for her perfect looks, which include her hair, makeup, clothes, and everything else that goes along with it. These looks lead girls to spending hours caking on makeup in the mirror, destroying their hair with dye, straighteners and curling irons, and begging their parents for the most popular and expensive clothes to try and achieve the ultimate “Barbie” doll look. (Wanless 2001)Young girls who grow up playing with Barbie dolls are likely to suffer from emotional distress, poor self-image, and lack of self-confidence.
The average three to ten year-old girl in the United States owns eight Barbies. Only one percent of this group owns no Barbies. (Munger 2006) Barbie is often said to have the perfect body, but what most people don’t realize is that if Barbie was an actual
human, she most definitely would not be healthy. If Barbie were an actual human, she would stand about 5’6,” weigh about 120 pounds and have the measurements of thirty eight inches for her chest, eighteen inches at her waist, and thirty four inches at her hips. (Hitz 2012) Researchers say that Barbie would not be able to menstruate because she would not have the body fat percentage to do so. (Hitz 2012) The fact is that were an average woman to mirror the proportions of a Barbie doll, she would need to grow 17 inches in height and have a body shape found in less than one in 100,000 women. (Women’s Health, 2012) Obviously, Barbie’s body is not average and not easily attainable either. In 1965, Mattel, the creator of Barbie, came out with a “Slumber Party Barbie” that came complete with a bathroom scale permanently set at 110 pounds. It also came with a book entitled How to Lose Weight and inside the book it gave advice to not eat. The matching Ken doll also came with slumber party accessories, but he was equipped with milk and cookies, which sent a very different message. (Hitz 2012)
Many of studies have been performed in regards to how and if the Barbie doll affects young girls’ self-esteem. One of these studies, which was performed by three students from two different college universities, studied a total of 162 girls, from age five to age eight. Each of these girls were exposes to images of either Barbie dolls, Emme dolls, or no dolls and then completed assessments of body image. Compared to girls in other exposure conditions, the girls exposed to Barbie reported lower body esteem and a greater desire for a thinnger body. (Dittmar, Halliwell, Ive 2006) However, this negative impact of Barbie doll was no longer evident in the oldest girls of the study. These findings indicate that, even if dolls cease to function as aspirational role models for older girls, early exposure to the Barbie doll representing an unrealistically thin body ideal may damage girls’ body image. This contributes to an increased risk of eating disorders in girls and weight cycling. (Dittmar, Halliwell, Ive 2006) A perfect example of how Barbie has impacted and affected an actual woman is the story of Cindy Jackson. Cindy looked at a Barbie doll when she was six years old and said, “This is what I want to look like. I think a lot of little six year old girls or younger even now are looking at that doll and thinking, “I want to be her.”” (Dittmar, Halliwell, Ive 2006; Jackson CBS News, 2004). Cindy Jackson has gone through twenty plastic surgery operations and ended up spending about $55,000 to reach her goal of becoming Barbie. (Hitz 2012)
The Barbie doll has been around for ages and will continue to stay around for many more.
The effects of these dolls are obvious and can extend to as far as Cindy Jackson’s story. The unfortunate part is that self body image is extremely important in the world we live in today and is doubtfully going to change. If parents are more aware of the effects that Barbie can have on young children, hopefully they can confront the situation so that their children never take extremes like Cindy Jackson
did.

References
Dittmar, H., Halliwell, E., & Ive, S. (2006). Does barbie make girls want to be thin? the effect of experimental exposure to images of dolls on the body image of 5-to-8-year-old girls.Developmental Psychology, 42(2), 283-292. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.42.2.283
Hitz, S. (2012). Find your true beauty..in christ. Retrieved from http://www.teen-beauty-tips.com/barbie-body-image.html
Munger, D. (2006, April 19 ). Cognitive daily: What barbie does for a little girl. Retrieved from http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2006/04/19/post
Wanless, M. D. (2001). Barbie 's body images. Feminist Media Studies, 1(1), 4. doi: 10.1080/14680770120042909
Women 's Health. (2012). The barbie effect. Retrieved from http://www.epigee.org/the-barbie-effect.html