In Defense of Girlhood
LOS ANGELES — Renee Curry ushered four girls into the classroom and asked them to sit on the carpet. They were brighteyed and giggly, jittery with excitement.
Curry emptied the contents of a large reusable shopping bag onto the floor. The girls, ages 5 to 7, wasted no time. They plunged their hands into a pile of tiny plaid skirts, gingham dresses and sparkly tutus, eagerly selecting their dolls’ first outfits of the day.
“Grab your doll and we’re gonna dress them while we talk,” Curry, now seated on the rug, said as she pulled Black and brown dolls from another bag. The girls let out a collective shriek and claimed the dolls they’d been playing with for the last few weeks.
“All right,” Curry said, trying to capture the girls’ attention as they argued over whose doll was whose. “We’re going to go around and introduce our dolls.”
A first-grader cradling two babies in her lap went first. “This is Mark,” she said. “He’s 1 year old, his favorite color is green and his favorite food is broccoli and carrots.”
“Do your dolls like broccoli and carrots?” Curry asked the other girls.
“No!” they yelled in unison.
A similar scene played out every Thursday afternoon between August and March in this classroom at Crete Academy, a nonprofit charter school in South Los Angeles that serves students who have experienced homelessness and poverty.
Curry is an associate marriage and family therapist and the architect of In Defense of Girlhood, a therapy group that aims to preserve the innocence of young Black girls through doll play.
The group is a unique attempt to address “adultification bias” — a form of racial prejudice that can lead teachers and other authority figures to treat Black girls as more mature than they actually are and, as a result, give them less support or punish them more harshly than their white counterparts, research shows.
This presumption can affect Black girls as young as 5. In the case of Crete students, the effects of adultification bias are compounded by poverty; many of their parents are single, working night shifts or multiple jobs, and rely upon their children to help run the household.
So for an hour each week, Curry strives to remind her group of girls that they are, in fact, little girls. She validates their innocence by celebrating play and encouraging childlike banter. She cultivates their confidence and nourishes their friendships.
And she has a lot of fun doing it.
The seeds for the doll group were planted in spring 2019, when Curry had just begun giving oneon-one therapy to girls in need of extra support at Crete Academy. After reading a paper on adultification bias from the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, she immediately thought of the girls she’d been working with.
In the first study of its kind in 2017, Georgetown researchers found that adults believed Black girls needed less nurturing and protection, were more independent and knew more about sex than white girls of the same age.
“Adultification contributes to a false narrative that Black youths’ transgressions are intentional and malicious, instead of the result of immature decisionmaking — a key characteristic of childhood,” researchers wrote.
The study asserted that such bias contributes to the harsher treatment of Black girls in the education and juvenile justice systems, and fewer mentorship and leadership opportunities being available to them. Black girls are nearly six times more likely to be suspended than their white counterparts, according to research by the African American Policy Forum and Columbia Law School.
As a therapist, Curry knew that if children aren’t given the time and space to play, imagine, explore and be free of the pressures and stresses of their world, there’s a much higher chance that they will be more childlike as adults.
“They’ll struggle with responsibilities to take care of their own,” Curry said. “They’ll struggle with intimacy. They’ll struggle with having conversations with their partners. So we want them to experience childhood at appropriate age levels.”
When she read the Georgetown study on adultification bias, a light bulb went off.
“I totally think this is real. This is a thing,” Curry told Crete Principal Hattie Mitchell after sharing the study with her. “I want to do something.”
Mitchell identified a few girls in kindergarten through second grade who she thought would benefit from the group. They were girls who had already been assigned a social worker because something difficult had happened in their families, events that led to changes in their behavior or academic performance. Others were overwhelmed by the daily grind of poverty.
“When you think about a single mom with three kids, what will she buy? Food and clothes. Shoes and backpack,” Mitchell said. “Toys are last on the list.”
Early on, Curry noticed that girls used their dolls as a way to work through complicated emotions and situations.
During a session in November, one girl told the group that her doll, Tiana, was being bullied at school.
One girl picked up a doll wearing cat-eye glasses and one hot pink soccer cleat and pretended that it was speaking to her friend’s doll.
“If someone pushes you down, I’ll help you out,” she said. “If someone says you’re ugly, I’ll tell them that you’re not.” The girls smiled at each other and forced their dolls to hug, an awkward entanglement of plastic limbs.
In the 2017 study, “Girlhood Interrupted,” researchers Jamilia Blake of Texas A&M University and Rebecca Epstein of Georgetown University examined how adults perceived the innocence — or lack thereof — of Black girls specifically. The report was built on earlier research that found Black boys as young as 10 are far more likely than their white peers to be seen as older, guilty of suspected crimes, and face police violence if accused of a crime.
Adultification bias can be unknowingly enforced by the parents of Black girls even as they seek to counteract it, according to anecdotes collected in a followup study to the 2019 Georgetown report.
“No matter what your skin color, a 7-year-old’s brain is a 7-year-old’s brain,” Epstein said. “Our systems have to treat children as children.”
While the long-term effects the doll group might have on the girls are unknown, Curry said, she witnessed a lot of growth during their seven months together.
Curry watched the girls’ imaginations expand. The stories they shared about the lives of their dolls became more nuanced and vulnerable, and they began to speak more candidly of family dynamics.
Mitchell noticed that the girls would hold hands and throw their arms around one another — things she didn’t see them doing in other social groups.
“There’s a sense of connection and stability and security that wasn’t there before,” Mitchell said in March. “For the moments that they’re in the group, their guard is down. They’re not acting cool. They’re just being kids.
“For that hour, the world is a perfect place.”