HyggeMama

Meet Zora, Quan Yin, and Lakshmi. 👩🏿‍🦱👧🏻👧🏽
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Zora was handmade in the Waldorf style of doll making by . Quan Yin was an unnamed hand-me-down (and has been my 4 year-old’s favourite doll from the jump), and Lakshmi I picked up from an independent toy store — they’re both made by . Zora is named for the late great author Zora Neale Hurston, Quan Yin for the Chinese goddess of compassion, and Lakshmi for the Hindu goddess of good fortune.
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Ensuring that almost every doll I ever got my kid represented a different ethnic background than our own was one of the very least things I could do to promote the value of diversity in my family. And it wasn’t as easy as it should have been. My mum and I hunted for BIPOC dolls. Our local toy shops, big and small, were hit and miss. I could never find non-white dolls at Costco, but my mum found some at Walmart (which I boycott for socioeconomic reasons).
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I will confess that when my kid’s Black ECEs in the toddler room approached me laughing about their surprise that when the big basket of plastic babies came out, Juniper generally gravitated to the darker-skinned ones, I was pleased. I hoped it meant that she was interested in diversity in spite of the fact that her family of origin and most of her classmates are of European ancestry.
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I gotta tell you, I had to sit on this post for a few days because I don’t want it to read as self-congratulatory, or performative (I’ve shared a great post about this by in my stories). I want to share to encourage you do to the same for the kids in your life (if you haven’t already) and to say that acts of can be big and small, but when it comes to parenting conscientiously, we can always do more. Because even if we don’t deliberately teach it, the messages of the capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy are pervasive, and your kid’s gonna pick up on them anyway. And “white = normal,” and “non-white = other” is not the standard I envision for our future.