Baby Dolls Raise a Stink In More Ways Than One

Clearly, to toymakers, the answer is yes.

"For us, the peeing and pooping is pretty magical," said Kathleen Harrington, senior brand manager for Hasbro's Baby Alive dolls. "As adults, we might be a little grossed out. But it's so magical and so funny and so silly for these girls. This little doll is coming to life, so the little girl doesn't believe it's just a doll. It's her baby." Harrington calls it part of the doll's "Wow!" factor.

But to some child development experts, the answer is a resounding no.

With 5,000 toys introduced into the market every year, "what happens is that there's huge competition to get noticed. And what that means to toys is that they get more and more and more and more outrageous," said Susan Linn, professor of child psychology at Harvard and director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. "This toy is shocking enough that it's going to be noticed. But at best, this toy is unnecessary. At worst, it's really gross."

But Jim Silver, editor of Time to Play, a Web magazine that reviews toys, says children want reality.

"By the time they're 5 or 6, they don't want a play cellphone, they want a real cellphone," Silver said. "A baby doll is all about nurturing. So what Mom went through with them, they want to go through with their dolls. And how do you do real potty training without pooping?" Silver said he laughed when he first saw the pooping dolls and wondered if they were necessary. Although he said he has been sworn to secrecy about next year's new toys, an early peek shows reality is only going to get more real. "You're going to see the envelope pushed to make baby dolls as real as possible without being offensive in any way.

And, he said, it's not as if the toymakers don't know what they're doing. Mattel's Little Mommy dolls, he said, are the biggest-selling baby dolls on the market, with annual sales upwards of $50 million. Baby Alive dolls, which debuted in 1973 and were retooled and reintroduced to the market a couple of years ago after a decade-long hiatus, are the No. 2 seller.

It's the kind of trend that makes Linn angry enough to write books, such as her recent "The Case for Make Believe."

"This is part of a greater trend to create toys that do everything," she said. "And in the process of marketing those toys to children and flooding the market with those toys, what we're doing is depriving children of opportunities for creative play. And that's the foundation of learning, of critical thinking, of creativity, of developing the capacity to wrestle with life, to make meaning of it. It's essential to their human development. What's happening is that toymakers are designing these toys that look great in ads but in fact really add nothing to children's inner life or their creative play."

High on Linn's Christmas toy shopping list: crayons, paper, blocks, stuffed animals and dolls that don't talk or move, much less say "Hurry, hurry" when they're about to mess their pants. "A really, really good toy is 90 percent child and 10 percent toy," she said. "But those are not the bestsellers."

What both sides of the play wars agree on is that children at the age of playing with baby dolls, generally ages 3 or 4 to 7, are endlessly fascinated by bodily functions, thus the popularity of such books as "Walter the Farting Dog," booger-green slime and squishy, squeezable, see-through toys that allow children to feel animals' guts, on shelves now. And potty training -- either because children are going through it or because they remember what it was like -- is a big, big deal.

That, manufacturers say, is why they're creating realistic dolls.