Ideas for Playing Barbie Dolls

Career Games

• With jobs ranging from fashion model to astronaut, Barbie provides girls with a positive example of a wide range of careers. Children love playing out the small details of an adult's day, whether it is clocking in at a store or helping patients at a clinic. Though Mattel provides accessories for various careers, imagination and crafting ability is the only actual limit on what a Barbie doll may do.

Creative Construction and Crafts

• While clothing and accessories are provided by Mattel and other toy companies, including a wardrobe, houses, cars and pets, Barbie provides a child the opportunity to learn simple sewing and supervised carpentry skills. Designing a wardrobe out of fabric scraps or constructing a homemade doll house teach valuable skills, including creativity, measuring, simple sewing and even an introduction to architectural construction and the properties of different building materials.

Modeling Healthy Relationships

• With a wide range of friend dolls, such as Midge, Theresa and Christie, an enormous family that includes four younger sisters, plus her long-standing boyfriend, Ken, and the other male dolls, Barbie provides an outlet to model healthy friendships, romantic relationships and of course, family relationships. How the dolls interact provides a powerful teaching tool for empathy, social problem solving and forming healthy relationships. One of Barbie's friends, Midge, includes a pregnancy model that demonstrates infant care and childbearing, while wheelchair-bound Becky provides an example of a friend with a mobility-based disability.

Fictional Adventures

• Whether copying stories from a favorite book or acting out characters from the child's imagination, Barbie lets children tell narratives and explore the full range of the possible and the impossible. With Barbie, a boulder in the back yard becomes a giant mountain for the doll to scale, and a bed spread can be a wide prairie to cross. Even a well-used Barbie doll with frizzy hair and only a few pieces of clothing can transport the child back in time or into the future, becoming a Renaissance princess, an early American settler in a wagon or a scientist discovering new alien lifeforms on a strange planet.