Early Pride Matters

Step 1: Gather materials.

• Take stock of the dolls in your classroom to see if they represent the diversity of the children in your program, as well as the aspects of diversity that you plan to explore during this activity.
• Add some diversity to your collection if your current dolls don’t meet this need. These dolls don't need to be expensive or even store-bought.
• While many classrooms have baby dolls, it's also beneficial to have dolls that represent the ages of the children in your program. This will enable you to create more immediately relatable pretend-play scenarios beyond those that are limited to providing basic care, such as feeding and swaddling a baby.

Step 2: Introduce activity.

• You can approach this activity in one of two ways:
  • Join a group of children who are already engaged in doll play and encourage and support their play.
  • Initiate a doll-play session. Introduce each doll, describe how the doll looks, and tell the children something about the doll’s interests, personality or family.
• With younger children, you might describe the doll’s features and then give them some time to explore the doll on their own.

Step 3: Engage children in activity.

• The goal here is to encourage interactive and social doll play (in other words, play that includes interaction with you and/or other children). Doll play is more beneficial to children’s social development when others are engaged alongside them. When you are engaged as well, it affords you the opportunity to reinforce and support the children’s awareness of each other and to promote basic social skills.
• You might choose to introduce ideas or themes. But remember that the goal is to support (rather than direct) children’s pretend play. We often need to let go of ingrained ideas about what certain types of play “should” look like and allow children to make their own discoveries.
• When children play in ways that challenge adult expectations or biases about gender, adults will often needlessly redirect or “correct” children. Instead, try these approaches:
  • Validate their choices by showing interest and enthusiasm. Dolls are for everyone!
  • Join their play as an inquisitive partner. For instance, instead of saying “Put the blanket on the baby,” you might say: “Ooooh, that baby looks cold. What can we do?”
  • Interrupt early biases that young children may express in their play as they make comments such as: “You can’t play with those!” Model and explain the values that you would like them to learn by using such statements as: "In our class, we encourage everyone to play with what they want." Or probe further with questions such as "Why do you think some children shouldn't play with those?"
  • Model the use of they/them pronouns as you play alongside the children.

Adaptations by age

Infants and toddlers

• The youngest children are learning basic pretend-play behaviors during this developmental period. They may pat or hug the dolls or begin to engage in simple acts of feeding. Use simple narration to highlight these important acts of love and care.
• As you and the children play, help them recognize common emotions by acting them out with your doll. When the children hug the doll, remind them how nice a hug feels. You might point out that the doll looked cold or sleepy when the children covered it with a blanket.
• Model how cold or sleepy the doll looked. This is an opportunity to help the children begin to understand that adults engage in caregiving behaviors because they recognize what babies need and how they feel.

Two-year-olds

• As the children gain more experience with doll play, they will engage in longer sequences of pretend-play behaviors (for example, taking the baby doll for a ride in its stroller or feeding a doll a meal and putting it to bed).
• As the children engage in pretend-play activities with the dolls, introduce feelings into the doll play with comments such as: “Dancing makes your baby so happy!”
• Ask the children to consider feelings in their play by asking questions such as: “I wonder if they feel tired?”
• Invite the children to explore empathy by making comments such as: “She’s jumping so high. Is she feeling excited?” Or simply ask: “How are they feeling?”
• Two-year-olds also routinely encounter everyday conflicts in the early childhood classroom. These conflicts present a valuable opportunity to appeal to children’s emerging understanding that others have emotions and that we can solve problems together. Help the children begin to develop these skills by serving as an emotional interpreter as they navigate these rough spots. For example, you might say: “She feels sad because you don’t want to play with her” or “They’re telling you that they don’t like that.”
• Then support the children with alternative solutions to these everyday problems.
• It’s important to support the development of empathy and problem-solving simultaneously. After all, problem-solving without building empathy is impossible—and empathy without action changes very little in the classroom environment.

Preschoolers

• In your preschool classroom, some of the dolls may have names, personalities and backgrounds. These characteristics may be selected intentionally by you or chosen in collaboration with the children.
• During pretend play, you might present specific scenarios to encourage the preschoolers to hear, learn and use new words that expand their expressive vocabulary. These scenarios could include situations that evoke feelings of frustration, fear, sadness, and exclusion—or positive emotions such as pride, excitement, happiness, or love.
• As you play, ask the children what they think the doll(s) might be feeling in these situations and why. You might ask:
  • “How does the doll feel when he can wear whatever he wants?”
  • “How do you think the doll feels when a friend does something kind?”