Nah. You have a birthday party at the bounce house place and invite your 5 year old's entire K class and your daughter tells all her friends she likes Barbie so the kids buy a $10 Barbie "surprise" doll of some kind or one of the $15 sets and you have 30+ pretty damn fast.
I knew there was a reason, beyond the feeling that the other parents were cliquish, we never had a whole-class party for my 15-year-old!!! 🤣🤣🤣
Our school has a policy, which I think is probably for the best, that you can't send invitations to school unless they are for the entire class. So it encourages you to invite everyone until they reach cell phone age and just set up their own invites. I get why they do it.
So did our elementary schools, and I think that's the fairest way to handle at-school invites! Because class lists are apparently taboo in the 21st century, the admin suggested you could go through the teachers to ask who your kid played with at recess, but AYFKM?
(TBC, not a defense of trump, he's a fucking idiot, but little kids do end up with huge piles of plastic figures. And this isn't new. My cousins in the mid 80s had a huge bin of Barbies and their dad was a mechanic in WV).
In the '80s, my cousins K & L also had what felt like every Barbie known to mankind ... their parents were teachers. I ... barely played with dolls.
It was so much more expensive back then too. Like, they cost about the same but it was a much bigger deal to spend $15. With how much stuff kids get via subscription (TV, movies, music, games) we try to encourage family to buy them experiences instead (tickets and passes to things).
My family spent non-food money on Catholic school tuition (K-8) for what would eventually be 4 kids. We all switched to public once I finished 8th grade. But, yeah, $15 or $20 for a Barbie was aspirational!
Many of us played with knock-off Barbies, cheaper versions.
I didn't play with them at all.
Yeah, my mother thought they were too sexualized and banned them from the house - five daughters.
No bans here; I simply didn't play with dolls, full stop. Blocks, (homemade) Play-Doh, and LEGO, on the other hand? All the time.
I played with everything and still do. ;)
My youngest daughter has probably 40+ Barbies, totally happens
Now if we were talking about those big American girl / our generation sized dolls, 2-3 max. No more. They are huge. Where am I supposed to put them all???
I had two; I used babysitting money, my allowance, and a "Christmas Club" savings account to fund them + a set of the hardcover books (used to be 6 short chapter books with themed stories & historical info in the back.) They were my Big Gifts in 1988 and 1989.
I think 2 is the right number! And then hand me downs from older siblings.
I'm the eldest and my sister was told, in no uncertain terms, that they were off-limits. She'll be 40 in January and she's still talking about it! I still have mine & I wasn't emotionally able to share them with my daughter when she was still playing with dolls.
My wife is the EXACT SAME
I *earned* them by babysitting my thankless, ill-behaved younger siblings, developing a network of regular sitting clients, AND saving my own money when I was 10 and 11 years old. Do you understand the self-restraint I had to have in order to earn that cash?
That’s gospel. We also have far too many squishmallows and I had to say no more.