Kids who have disabilities are generally thrilled to be given dolls who share their disability. It is nothing to do with making fun of them and all about being open about disability and not trying to Other it into invisibility.

Interestingly you can buy your Build-A-Bear a wheelchair!

Also, really liked Beppie’s comment (#9).

I was just going to say the same thing. At the height of the Cabbage Patch Kids craze, Christmas rolled around, and my parents had waited too long to find me a blonde one that looked like me, which would have been ideal in my mind. So I ended up with an African-American Cabbage Patch Kid, and it took me about 5 seconds to get over the disappointment that she didn’t look like me and go absolutely freakin’ nuts for that doll — I carried her everywhere for aaaaages, and I might have loved her even more than my dog for a while there.

It sounds kind of dumb, but considering A) my age, and B) the fact that I was growing up in a super white town, where I rarely had the opportunity to interact with people of color, having an African-American doll that I was gaga for really was a meaningful step toward normalizing different skin colors for me. How many people generalize about and stereotype groups of people they’ve never encountered personally, then have a change of heart (to some extent, anyway) when they meet just one person from a given group and grok that that person is fully human? For a little kid, a doll can actually sort of be that person. (And of course there’s loads of work to come in terms of dismantling internalized isms after that first “A-ha” moment, but especially for children, simple exposure can make a big difference.) I’m sure that if they’d made a Cabbage Patch Kid with a disability, I would have fallen in love with that one just as quickly (especially if it came with a service dog). And the next time I saw a person with the same disability, I might have thought, “Hey, you’re like my awesome doll!” instead of “Hey, you’re not like me! What’s wrong with you?”

no one was even talking about the way that these dolls could help foster empathy and respect for disabled people in fully-abled children.

Including, I might add, children who already know friends, family members, or just acquaintances with disabilities. I grew up with a disabled brother and knew a lot of kids with disabilities who were friends/classmates/teammates of his, and I think it would have been cool to have had dolls with disabilities. I certainly remember liking the few dolls of color I had (who, sadly, were mostly billed as Barbie’s “exotic” friends) even though I’m white.

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Hey, did you get an email from the Creature Discomforts people? (link opens with sound) Looks like an interesting awareness campaign in the UK.

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no one was even talking about the way that these dolls could help foster empathy and respect for disabled people in fully-abled children.

Word. And doll companies in general could do a lot more to help normalise the varieties of humans out there, rather than this sort of thing being relegated to a “specialist” (expensive++) niche.