It’s not uncommon to see children carrying a baby doll wherever they go. Whether at the kitchen table or a restaurant in town, interactive dolls seem to make excellent companions for young kids.
But do realistic interactive baby dolls have any benefits to children? The short answer is yes!
When you buy a realistic baby doll for a child for Christmas, you’re giving them so much more than just a toy. Take a look at some of the incredible benefits that interactive dolls bring to children.
Boosts Your Child’s Imagination
The best interactive realistic dolls help boost your child’s imagination. When children play with dolls, whether alone or with a friend, they can tap into imaginative play and creativity, which is excellent for developing an extensive imagination.
Dramatic play is crucial in helping children explore their thoughts and feelings, and it allows them to act out real-life situations with the freedom to choose their stories.
Between the ages of two and three, when you are most likely to see a child playing with an interactive doll, children are likely to begin playing pretend. Many props and toys will come into play during this time. Dishes, pretend food, cars, blocks, and baby dolls are very common tools during role play activities for kids.
A strong imagination will follow your child throughout their lifetime. Those with great creativity can excel both in learning institutions and their career. A highly imaginative child may grow up to be a writer, an actor, a digital creator, a movie producer, and more.
Develops Problem-Solving Skills
While using their imagination and learning how to care for a baby doll, your child also develops strong problem-solving skills by playing with realistic dolls.
Imagining various scenarios with a doll can help your child to think critically about a situation and develop a realistic solution.
For instance, an interactive baby doll might cry. When that happens, your child must figure out how to make the baby stop crying. Is it hungry? Is it tired? Does it need a nappy change? By playing with our unique Susie interactive doll, your child can learn about various solutions and choose the one that has the best outcome.
Problem-solving skills are crucial to our everyday lives. We use these skills in our personal lives, work lives, relationships, and hobbies to solve the small and large predicaments we encounter.
Read our guide on what skills do children develop through playing with dolls?
Teaches Them How to Care for Others
Taking care of an interactive baby doll lays the foundation for a child to learn how to care for other people. Many of today’s interactive dolls can cry, giggle and laugh. You can either carry these or push them along in dolls prams and pushchairs. Your child could even put their doll in a dolls car seat for a trip out or in a doll high chair to keep them safe.
These features teach a child the basic needs of a baby. When they learn how to take care of it, it can help them become nurturing towards others.
In most cases, young children stay in the baby role while the adults take care of them. Giving a child an interactive doll allows them to safely and temporarily take on the role of the caregiver.
Learning how to care about other people is a valuable life skill that will impact your child for the rest of their life. It will determine how they relate to others in a wide range of relationships, from romantic relationships to friendships to professional relationships and everything in between.
A caring person forms important bonds and is viewed positively by others. Caring people can brighten someone’s day, do a good deed, and even change the world.
Improves Social and Interactive Skills
Social skills are incredibly important for a child to learn early on in their life. From a very early age, as young as 12 months, your baby starts to separate their emotions and learn what each of them means.
As they get older, this recognition and expression will only get stronger, which is why social development is so important. The more a child can engage with other people, the more their social skills will grow.
Part of playing with others and learning social skills can come from playing with an interactive realistic baby doll.
Playing with a doll generally goes hand-in-hand with playing house, and it’s during this activity, many children learn good communication and interactive skills. In a way, your child can practice socialising at a very early age by interacting with these lifelike toys.
People will always surround your child, so they must learn how to interact and socialise properly. Whether in school or the workplace in later life, good social skills can help a person succeed in all areas.
Teaches Empathy and Kindness
In growing up and becoming more aware of everything around them, toddlers can easily become overwhelmed by all of the emotions they’re learning and experiencing in their day-to-day lives.
That’s why tantrums and emotional outbursts are so common at this age; they simply don’t know what to do with their emotions. But gifting your young child a doll at Christmas can give them a structured way to learn some of their emotions, namely kindness, empathy, love, and tenderness.
A young child quickly takes ownership of their doll and treats it as if it were their child. With your guidance, they learn to take care of it and develop a very maternal or paternal nurturing attitude towards the toy.
In response to playing with dolls, don’t be surprised if you see your child grow into a kind and loving person who empathises well with others.
The ability to empathise and show kindness is a special gift in this world. Having these well-developed and complex emotions can determine the type of person your child grows up to be. It can impact the way they treat people and be a great tool in their relationships.
Gives a Sense of Responsibility
When you give a child something that they can take care of as a gift, you’re giving them more than just a toy. An interactive baby doll helps a young child learn responsibility.
Realistic dolls help your child understand that if they don’t take care of them, no one else will. Playing with and spending time with these dolls shows children how to take care of and be responsible for the things they own.
In some cases, your child may even learn the consequences when they see what happens if they don’t take care of their things. A failure to look after their doll may result in them losing it or it getting broken.
It’s vital to teach your child at an early age that responsibility is important. The responsibility of a doll could later turn into the responsibility of a pet, for example.
Buy an Interactive Baby Doll for Christmas
Buying an interactive baby doll for Christmas invests in the positive development of your child. From social skills and imagination to empathy and responsibility, there are so many things a child can learn just by playing and interacting with a baby doll.
Consider getting your young child a Susie interactive doll for Christmas this year and learn everything you need to know about interactive dolls. You’ll love watching them learn to be successful and patient nurturers and friends.
Susie is incredibly unique and exclusive to Play Like Mum. You can also magically unlock special features for the Susie interactive doll with our Daisy Chain Connect 5 in 1 Dolls Pram or Daisy Chain Pinnacle Double Dolls Pram. When you bring her near the pram she will let you know if she wants to go for a walk or tell you when she wants to be put back into her pram.
For further inspiration, take a look at our guides on Christmas present ideas for girls and Christmas present ideas for boys.