Barbie Dolls: Connection to Place and Sociocultural Development

This essay explores the significance of Barbie dolls as play-based artefacts in childcare settings, focusing on their role in fostering a connection to place and promoting sociocultural development in children. The analysis highlights how Barbie dolls, manufactured by Mattel since 1959, support creativity, imagination, and empathy, while also encouraging relationship building and ethical development. The essay emphasizes the importance of Barbie dolls in establishing an emotional bond between children and their environment, fostering a sense of place. Furthermore, it examines the sociocultural aspects, noting how Barbie dolls, with their diverse features and roles, positively impact a child's understanding of society and enhance their creativity, addressing gender stereotypes and promoting social skills. The conclusion reinforces the effectiveness of Barbie dolls as play artefacts that contribute to social skill development and a stronger connection to the environment.

Play Based Artefacts

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
Connection to Place................................................................................................................1
Analysis of the artefact using the "Socio-Cultural" lens:.......................................................2
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................2
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................2

INTRODUCTION
The play based artefact that has been studied in current project is Barbie Dolls. The Barbie is
a fashion doll which is manufactured by the American toy company Mattel, Inc. and launched in
March 1959 and since than it has become a most common pay based artefacts on all childcare
centres across the world (Unahalekhaka and Govind, 2021).
The main reason and usefulness of the Barbie dolls as play artefact in a child care comprises
of the fact that tends to help and support the development of child through facilitating creativity
and imagination along with developing higher empathy. Further, children also tend to develop
relationship and connection with their Barbie dolls that promote ethical development and feeling
of love and care.
Connection to Place
The place attachment or connection to place tend to reflects about the emotional bond
between the child and place and is tend to be influenced by the environmental psychology and
personal experience of the child. Barbie dolls plays a vital role in setting the connection to place
as it brings into and supports the emotional connection of child with the environment and
encourage a child to fully connect to the surroundings (Arciniega, 2021). It has been also seen
that Barbie dolls are very attractive and have many creative features that ensures and supports
imagination power of the child and they feel fascinated about them which ensures and lead to
improved connection and create sense of place which ultimately ensure higher attachment and
improved connection in child towards the place.
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Analysis of the artefact using the "Socio-Cultural" lens:
The society of Australia is based on multicultural and having a very diverse society thus,
it has become vital for the child care centres to equip their places with culturally diverse toys and
activities along with the artefacts that is liked by people of all cultural. It has been presented and
reflected by the socio cultural theory that the views of people belonging to different cultural are
diverse in nature and each generation also tend to have different view point (Wang and et. al.,
2021). But, Barbie dolls are something that is being liked for playing by the people belonging to
various culture as it is something is supporting the personal development of child. Further,
Barbie Dolls are coming in various feature having different dressing styles along with Barbie kits
featuring doctors, army man, fashion, etc. thus leads a positive impact on the socio cultural
development of the child and enhanced and supports their creativity level and improved
relationship with society. Further, people of many cultural tend to have a thinking that Boys
should not allowed or encouraged to play with dolls because of prevailing gender stereotypes
that consider dolls to be feminine, and thus not ideal for boys. But recently, after many research,
it has been find out that boy’s plying with doll is normal and reflects the sensitive side and helps
in developing social skill and make them more aware about how to communicate and interact
with others (Hussien, Mahmoud and Zayed, 2020).
CONCLUSION
Based on current project, a conclusion can be made that Barbie doll is an effective play
artefact in childcare that supports better connection to place and also leads to development of
social skills in child.
REFERENCES
Books and journal
Arciniega, L., 2021. Archiving the Future: The Uneasy Relationship between Individual Memory
and Communal Artifacts in Station Eleven.
Canadian Review of Comparative
Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée,
48(2), pp.296-310.
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Hussien, N.Y., Mahmoud, R.O. and Zayed, H.H., 2020. Deep Learning on Digital Image
Splicing Detection Using CFA Artifacts.
International Journal of Sociotechnology and
Knowledge Development (IJSKD),
12(2), pp.31-44.
Unahalekhaka, A. and Govind, M., 2021. Examining Young Children's Computational Artifacts.
In
Teaching Computational Thinking and Coding to Young Children (pp. 265-294). IGI
Global.
Wang, Z. and et. al., 2021, October. Attention Guided Spatio-Temporal Artifacts Extraction for
Deepfake Detection. In
Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision
(PRCV) (pp. 374-386). Springer, Cham.
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