Sarah Gerson

My child struggles with close relationships.

those children who seem to struggle more with peer relationships actually seem to show a greater benefit from this style play in terms of their theory of mind than the children who had fewer struggles.

So we thought that was really interesting as well.

I think this is the I'm wary to say, like, get them a doll.

It will solve everything.

But I think the idea is more so if your child is interested in dolls, let them and it can be helpful for them.

And I think there's variability.

Like you said, you know, you may have talked to your blanket as a child.

I have an only child child.

who's very imaginative and is actually the perfect for anecdotes about these things because she will turn anything into a character.

My dad has sent me pictures of her out at dinner with him and she's turned a ketchup bottle into a mom and a salt shaker into a baby, et cetera, et cetera.

So some children will embrace anything to make it about that.

Some will be into dolls, some will be into stuffed animals or blankets and whatever they choose to use, it's kind of embracing what they naturally do.

Yeah.

So I think in this research, a lot of people expected the benefits to be specific to girls or that we'd only study girls.

And we intentionally recruited both boys and girls.

Of course, not every parent is going to volunteer for their boy to play with this because I think there's going to be some bias in that.

But we had the qualification that all parents who signed up for the study had to be okay with their child playing with dolls and or playing with tablets.

So we had...

no families who were saying, my child's not allowed on screens at all, and no families saying, my child's not allowed to play with dolls at all.