Children's toys

Actually there are a few books out there with an aa/cc male and female set of interracial parents, and offspring. Less out there for the "non traditional" tra family. Back when with my oldest bio son, I found, and promptly bought a toddler doll that looked just like him.. it was his skin shade; As a toddler his hair color and skin color was the same shade. Light skin, light hair. The multi-ethnic toy market is much better than it used to be. DDs doll house has dolls of various hues that match our immediate family. If a doll looks similar to my kiddos, I purchase regardless of the titled ethnic group. I have used Latino titled dolls to match the lighter skinned Latino people in our family, as well as the lighter skinned Black people in our family. In addition, I added darker skinned dolls. Hair texture in dolls is more of a problem for the tighter haired curl patterned folks. In other words, match the dolls to the kid or their family structure. As for the integration bit, yes the simple thing is for the parents to mix the dolls up from the get go. We did that for a biracial child first set of Weebles.

Last year i got Cam the Peter doll from "Snowy Day". [url=http://www.amazon.com/Snowy-Doll-Ezra-Jack-Keats/dp/1579822339/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1322610782&sr=8-2]Amazon.com: Snowy Day 15" Doll (9781579822330): Ezra Jack Keats: Books[/url] I liked that it wash plush, that it was brown, and because Cam looked exactly like Peter doll when in her red jacket...just like Peter's. :D She never touched that doll. Sat in her crib, ignored. In the last month, I placed him with her other transracial dolls, and he's gotten some love...finally...lol. My mom has made an honest effort to buy dolls that are lighter in tone than AA, because Cam IS lighter. I have often thought of buying little families in brown and white, and mixing them up so Cam has a pretend family to match her own.

There's 2 books I know of about biracial girls with black moms & white dads: "Can I Pray With My Eyes Open" & "You Be Me, I'll Be You." As for toys if you have a girl who likes Barbies, you're in luck. Most of the black Barbies I've seen this year are light skinned with straight hair & biracial looking. Great if you have a biracial daughter, not so great for my dark skinned full AA daughter! The So In Style line of Barbies is great, they have 4 black Barbies, each with a different skin tone, so you can pick the one that's closest to yours. My daughter has 3 of them. I like to find dolls that look like her, & I'd love to find a dollhouse family that looks like ours!

I found a doll house with an AA family last year for S, and they also have it where you can buy the CC family so we could mix & match for her :) Here's the link [url=http://www.fisher-price.com/fp.aspx?st=5851&e=product&pid=55342&prodcat=dollhouse-thumb]My First Dollhouse (African-American Family) - Fisher Price Toys - My First Dollhouse[/url]She loves it! Here's a link to the other families you can buy :) [url=http://www.fisher-price.com/fp.aspx?st=5852&e=lfaccessories-thumb]Dollhouses - Loving Family Dollhouses From Fisher Price Toys[/url]You'll have to scroll down to see all the family members they have, which they've added lots since last Christmas, I'm going to have purchase more now! lol I've even caught S playing with them to include her birth family and that totally warms my heart! Also I saw a pp mention the difficulty getting tightly curly dolls, there's an amom on FB that takes Barbies or other similar dolls and curls the hair! When S is into those dolls I'll picking up a few of those. Search for Natural Dolls by Beads, Braids & Beyond! :)

I have always insisted on having a multiracial doll population, when we've had dolls. My granddaughter is the only one doll-playing age, right now, and she isn't that interested in dolls. She has some, at home, but rarely looks at them. Most that people give her are white, so I give her dolls that took black or biracial. I still hope she might like Barbies when she is a little older. If she does, I will get her one that looks like every race I can find. We had that with my kids and they always matched them up into families, with no race-matching.I have a good book for children that has 10 toddlers of different races, but I think I must have let Ashlyn take it home with her and I can't think of the title. I had some for my kids but none survived the move.Another thing we have is a multiracial population of Christmas angels and Santas. I don't think you have to look too long and hard to find them. I know I have gotten some of them at Walmart. Avon used to sell some nice thjings like that, but I don't know if they do any more.Playschool used to have some soft baby dolls designed for babies and toddlers that came in a variety of colors. Unfortunately, very few toys survived my young child, who preferred destroying toys to playing with them.Good luck finding things! I know they are out there, but some times you have to search.I just thought of a story I heard from another mother of a mixed family, who had bought her daughter a doll house and sets of both black dolls. She was concerned because her daughter always had the white dolls sitting together in the living room and the black dolls in bed. One day, she asked her daughter why. It turned out that the white dolls had bendable legs and black dolls didn't. She searched and found a set of black dolls with bendable legs and then her daughter started arranging her dolls without any tendency to color matching.Noelani

Nick, I'm in a tricky situation here... Would you do the same for a single parent household? I'm a single mom and have purchased a dollhouse as part of DDs Christmas. I'm trying to decide if I should remove the dad from the packaging... and only leave the mom and the child?? For some reason removing the dad is not sitting well with me... I could very well marry in the near future... I guess I could add the dad back to the family when that day comes. DD knows we are a family with one mom... and she knows that families are structured differently. She had friends in her old daycare that had 2 moms.. and one of her friends was also in a single dad household. BUT it just feels - for lack of a better word... "mean" of me to pluck out the dad. ~sigh~ I'm probably making too much of this... I'll xpost this later today in the single parent forum.

Full disclosure, I know the author of this one (her son goes to school with A), but I also just think it's a beautiful book: [url=http://www.amazon.com/Your-Peanut-Butter-Big-Brother/dp/B0042P5810/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2]Amazon.com: I'm Your Peanut Butter Big Brother: Selina Alko: Books[/url] It's a bi-racial boy with an AA dad and a CC mom thinking about his pending baby brother or sister and all the different ways he or she might look. It's a lovely look at an interracial family and the drawings are lots of fun. That said, since it's very much about biological families, I could imagine it raising questions from kids in families built through adoption. Not that that's a bad thing, just a thing to note.

I think I read where one of the single moms left the male doll out. The male doll could be kept out, or maybe be an uncle with his own house, or living with his sister (while he goes to college), and her child. :-)

I've read this one too. It's very cute!

Kim Wayan's has a book series called Amy Hodgepodge. [url=http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/yr/features/amyhodgepodge.html]Amy Hodgepodge - Books for Young Readers - Penguin Group (USA)[/url]

That looks very cute!

Fe - I got a wooden dollhouse for my son for Christmas this year. (Hey, they are great toys for dramatic play! The boys in my kindergarten loved the dollhouse!) I bought 2 sets of family dolls - the Fisher Price African American and Caucasian families - figuring he can mix them up any way he wants. Our family is different too, having 2 moms and no dad. But I won't take the dad dolls out because D knew very early that most families had a mom and a dad. I can't remember the comment he made . . . but even before he started school he said something that surprised me because he clearly understood that most families don't look like ours. So I'm leaving the dads in there and he can make a 2 mom family like ours if he wants to, or make a mom and dad family - whatever he feels like doing on any given day. Just like with books, I think it's great to have things that "look" like our kids and our families. But they don't always have to look like us, KWIM?

We have the wooden dolls/dollhouse too. I'm just making sure there is a doll to match everyone in our house (2 white moms, white sister, black brother) so there is a family that looks like ours and I figure the other black and white dolls can just be other family members or friends or whatever pretend family they want to have. My son sleeps with his Peter (Snow Day) doll every night.