Why baby dolls took over my flat (and what the science says)

I'm currently staring at a small, disembodied plastic leg poking out from beneath our sofa. It belongs to ‘Baby Susan’, a doll who has suffered more blunt force trauma in the past three weeks than an amateur rugby player. If you had asked me two years ago, before the twins arrived, I'd have confidently told you that my children would play exclusively with artisanal wooden blocks in a tastefully muted colour palette. Yet here I'm, fishing a miniature plastic bottle out of my left shoe at six in the morning.

The truth is, I had a very specific bias against them. I thought they were unnecessarily gendered, slightly terrifying, and entirely pointless. Why would a baby want to play with a fake baby? It felt entirely redundant. But then my daughters hit eighteen months, and something deeply primal switched on in their little heads, transforming our London flat into what appears to be a chaotic maternity ward run entirely by drunk toddlers.

The day the plastic roommates arrived

It started innocently enough. A well-meaning aunt sent us a soft, rag-style doll for their first birthday. I thought we were safe. But then we visited a friend’s house, and my girls discovered their first proper, three-dimensional baby doll. It was love at first sight, followed immediately by a violent physical altercation over who got to hold it by its neck.

I rapidly realised that we needed to buy our own to prevent further toddler warfare. But looking at the modern toy market is a genuinely unsettling experience. Some parents get deeply into realistic baby dolls—the ones with the tiny painted veins, the wispy hair, and actual weight to them. They're often referred to as reborn baby dolls, and I find them so viscerally unsettling that if someone brought one into my home, I'd immediately bury it in the garden just to be safe. I absolutely refuse to walk into the kitchen for a midnight glass of water and think there's an abandoned human infant sitting silently on top of the dog's bed.

I quickly established some ground rules for our own purchases. No batteries. No dolls that cry, wet themselves, or require a tiny, expensive plastic nappy. We eventually settled on a basic model that looked vaguely human but was clearly a toy. And that’s when the absolute madness truly began.

What the brain boffins actually think about this

Because I'm a former journalist who copes with parenting stress by aggressively researching things at 3am, I decided to look up why my daughters were suddenly so obsessed with aggressively rocking Baby Susan to sleep. I fully expected to read some dusty psychological theory from the 1950s.

Instead, I stumbled onto a massive 2020 neuroimaging study from Cardiff University. A group of very brave researchers actually managed to get 42 children into an MRI machine (which honestly deserves a Nobel prize just for the sheer logistical nightmare of getting toddlers to lie still) and watched what happened to their brains while they played with dolls.

Apparently, dragging a plastic baby by its ankle across a hardwood floor significantly increases activity in the posterior superior temporal sulcus. I'm completely butchering the science here, but my vague understanding from the abstract is that this is the part of the brain responsible for processing social cues and developing empathy. Roberta Golinkoff, a professor who seems to know entirely too much about children, reckons that kids use dolls as 'human surrogates' to rehearse real-life scenarios and process complicated feelings.

This explains a lot. Last week, one of my girls got a telling-off for throwing her porridge at the wall. Ten minutes later, I found her sitting in the corner, sternly wagging her finger at Baby Susan and speaking in a harsh, unintelligible gibberish that sounded suspiciously like my own angry voice. She was basically outsourcing her emotional processing to a piece of plastic.

Fine motor skills and the magnetic dummy incident

I had a chat with our health visitor recently, who vaguely suggested that wrestling tiny cardigans onto a doll helps toddlers develop their pincer grasp. This is apparently the specific finger movement they desperately need to master so they can eventually hold a pencil and, presumably, forge my signature on their school report cards.

They love trying to dress the dolls, but they completely refuse to use actual doll clothes. Instead, they try to stuff Baby Susan into their own Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit. It’s actually my absolute favourite piece of clothing they own because the envelope shoulders mean I can pull it down over their legs when we've a catastrophic nappy situation, and the fabric miraculously survives the constant stretching. Susan looks completely ridiculous swimming in a bodysuit meant for a one-year-old, but the organic cotton is so incredibly soft that I honestly don't care what they do with it, so long as it buys me four minutes of peace to drink a hot cup of tea.

Less successful are their attempts to feed the dolls. We own the Gentle Baby Building Block Set. They’re perfectly fine blocks—soft, squishy, theoretically educational, and great for throwing at your sister without causing a concussion. The girls are supposed to stack them, but instead, they’ve decided these rubbery squares are highly nutritious meals for Baby Susan. I now spend a significant portion of my afternoon watching two toddlers aggressively try to force a pastel-coloured rubber hexagon into a permanently closed plastic mouth, which inevitably ends in tears because Susan refuses to chew her food.

If you're desperately trying to find something—anything—that doesn't involve creepy plastic eyes or tiny magnetic dummies, you might want to browse our collection of sustainable, non-terrifying wooden toys instead.

Parallel chaos instead of a new sibling

We're not having any more children. The twins have entirely broken me, both financially and spiritually. But a lot of my parent friends are currently staring down the barrel of child number two, and the advice they're given regarding dolls is genuinely fascinating.

The pediatric nurses at Taking Cara Babies (who practically raised my girls via Instagram while I wept into the aforementioned cold tea) highly think giving a toddler a doll a couple of months before the real sibling arrives. The idea is to do something called 'parallel parenting'.

Basically, when you're changing the actual, screaming, flailing newborn’s nappy, you hand the toddler a spare wipe and tell them to change their doll’s nappy at the same time. If you're baby-wearing, you tie a scarf around the toddler so they can wear their plastic baby. It sounds completely exhausting to me—managing a real infant while simultaneously directing a tiny, incompetent understudy—but my friends swear it stops the toddler from trying to post the new baby through the letterbox out of jealousy.

The anatomy of a good plastic roommate

Of course, the type of doll you buy genuinely matters, a lesson I learned through a series of expensive and mildly dangerous mistakes.

If you're buying for a child under a year old, you absolutely must avoid anything with hard plastic eyes. Babies don't play with toys; they use them as blunt instruments to test the structural integrity of their own skulls. A hard plastic doll given to an eight-month-old will immediately be swung into their own forehead, resulting in tears and a very awkward conversation at the NHS walk-in centre. You want embroidered facial features. Nothing that can detach, nothing that can shatter a kneecap.

Once they hit the toddler stage, your only priority should be washability. Don't buy a doll that can't go in the washing machine. You will find it covered in hummus. You will find it floating in the dog's water bowl. You will find it inexplicably smeared in Calpol. Putting a doll in the washing machine is an exercise in psychological endurance—seeing a little face spinning round and round pressed against the glass door is the stuff of nightmares—but it's strictly necessary.

This is where silicone baby dolls become quite popular. They're a massive step up from the rigid, hollow plastic nightmares we had in the 90s, mostly because food-grade silicone is soft, durable, and doesn't harbour as many terrifying bacteria in its crevices.

When my girls were cutting their molars, we bought the Panda Teether. I highly think it because the flat shape honestly fits into the back of their mouths without gagging them, and you can lob it straight into the dishwasher when it gets covered in dog hair. Naturally, they don't just use it for themselves anymore. They frequently diagnose Baby Susan with severe imaginary teething pain, violently rubbing the bamboo-textured silicone against the doll's rigid face to 'make her feel better'. The panda looks slightly traumatised these days, but it has survived the abuse perfectly.

The representation question

There's also the rather serious business of what these dolls honestly look like. Play experts (another job title I find utterly baffling) stress that you shouldn't just buy dolls that look exactly like your own children.

I thought this was just modern parental overthinking, but it honestly makes total sense. If a kid's entire toy box is just a mirror of their own face, they're going to be quite shocked when they encounter the actual, diverse human world. We made a point to get dolls with different skin tones and hair textures. There are some brilliant brands out there doing incredible work with this—dolls with glasses, dolls with hearing aids, dolls with Down syndrome. It completely normalises physical differences before they even have the vocabulary to ask about them.

What happens when they grow up

I hear that older kids eventually move on to styling detailed doll hair and changing complicated outfits, but honestly, by the time my two reach the age of four, I fully expect them to be negotiating treaties and running their own household, so I refuse to worry about that stage yet.

For now, I've simply accepted my fate. I live in a flat where tiny, lifeless limbs protrude from behind cushions, where I must regularly apologise for sitting on a plastic head, and where I'm frequently commanded to kiss a piece of silicone goodnight. It's completely absurd, highly unhygienic, and apparently, exactly what their rapidly growing brains need.

Before you dive into the terrifying world of miniature prams and tiny plastic bottles, explore our full range of baby essentials designed for actual human children.

Frequently asked questions from the floor

Do boys need to play with these things too?
Absolutely, yes. Unless you're actively hoping to raise a man who freezes in terror the first time someone hands him a real baby, you should give your son a doll. The MRI scans don't care about gender; the empathy and social processing bits of the brain light up exactly the same way in boys. Let them practice being a dad. It beats them practicing how to hit each other with sticks.

Are silicone dolls honestly safe to chew on?
If you get a high-quality one made from food-grade silicone, yes. Our doctor practically begged us to check the materials of anything the twins were likely to put in their mouths (which is literally everything). Just avoid cheap knock-offs that smell like a chemical factory and stick to brands that explicitly state they're BPA and phthalate-free.

How do I wash a doll that's been dropped in a puddle?
If it's a soft-bodied doll, shove it in a pillowcase (to stop the limbs from getting tangled and ripped off), put it on a gentle 30-degree wash, and let it air dry. If it's a hard plastic or silicone doll, wipe it down with warm soapy water. Don't put a solid plastic doll in the tumble dryer unless you want to create a melted, horrifying art installation that will traumatise your child for life.

What's the deal with reborn dolls?
They're incredibly heavy, hyper-realistic dolls that look exactly like sleeping newborns, often bought by adult collectors or older children. Some people find them deeply comforting. I find them so terrifying that my fight-or-flight response activates just looking at a picture of one. It's entirely a matter of personal preference, but I absolutely don't want one in my house.

When should I introduce a doll for sibling prep?
According to the folks who seriously know what they're doing, about one to two months before the real baby arrives. Don't do it the day before, or the toddler will just associate the weird plastic thing with the sudden disappearance of their mother and the arrival of a screaming intruder. Give them time to practice dropping the doll on its head before they try it with their new brother.