Toy industry is playing the diversity game with new ranges

Disabled dolls may be a cynical ploy but if they better represent children, does it matter, asks Martyn Mclaughlin

Iarrived home the other night to find my eldest daughter busying herself in her playroom with a clutch of coloured pencils. She had found the memory book we gave her after my father’s death last year and was scribbling away contently.

In those first painful few weeks after his passing, the journal was a conduit for her grief. Blu-tacked photographs, stick figures, and hearts vied for space on every other page. Sometimes, there were just agitated scribbles. I knew what she meant.

Come the turn of the year, the sharpest edges of her loss had been blunted, and the entries to the journal became less frequent. We would still look together through the pictures, accepting and remembering, though the blank pages went unfilled.

Out of nowhere, the latest drawing presented a new chapter. It captured a happy time, mere weeks before his death, when we all went on a family holiday. It was a difficult trip, but a worthwhile one, designed to say goodbye and form lifelong memories. I will never forget seeing it rendered anew by my four-yearold’s hand.

But one detail took me by surprise. While the rest of us were depicted running through leafy trails, she drew my father racing ahead in his wheelchair, arms raised and a broad smile on his face.

He had only been immobile for the last two months of his life, and just like his illness, it did not define him. Yet it was a part of him, and I realised, part of my daughter’s defining impressions of him.

Since then, the issue of disability has nudged aside mermaids as her obsession of the moment. She comments excitedly on seeing disabled presenters and children on television, and has even taken to collecting the proceeds of a makeshift sweet shop in her bedroom for charity. Happily, this means I can look forward to a chocolate football after evening meals.

But in trying to encourage her interest further, I found it difficult to gauge my next step. There is a host of sensory and switch-operated toys designed for children with disabilities, but where are the toys which simply represent the wider disabled population?

Looking online, I discovered other parents searching for a similar answer. There is no shortage of books which help disabled children see themselves – and their loved ones – as they are, but what of the playthings? Something tangible to hold and to hug?

One Google search later, I realised it was not only parents asking such questions, but the world’s leading toy manufacturer. It turns out Mattel is to release a new range of Barbie dolls, complete with a wheelchair and prosthetic limbs. The move, it says, will help “elevate the conversation around physical disabilities”.

It may be because of my longstanding refusal to submit to the tyranny of pink which confronts my daughters in every toy shop, but I found it hard to get too excited.

It is, of course, welcome that the toy industry holds up a mirror to less able children, and the announcement has been understandably praised by campaigners. But perhaps it would be prudent to question whether Mattel is truly committed to diversity, or is simply trying to commodify it.

This is, after all, not the first time it has introduced a disabled figurine. In 1997, it released Share