apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Loving the Detacho Playhouse.

Isn't that cool? And the little side bit also detaches to be the home of the new partner that one parent is dating... an entire village of these would be utterly fascinating for a child with a complicated family tree.

I was fascinated by the figures who are attracted when they have smiley faces and repel when you put their frowns on! Talk about reality! It is great to see toys that reflect real life.

How utterly sad that people like the Detacho Playhouse! The look on the child's face says it all.

Yeh, divorce happens, but this is rediculous.

I disagree K, I think it is about time that they made toys which can change and incorporate divorce. For too long now this has been ignored, I agree with One Eyed Daruma- Is's great to see toys that reflect real life.

It's not just about divorce. It could be about a family with two mommies and a bio-dad that comes to visit. Or a collective house with a mommy and 6 housemates. Or a home with mommy and daddy and grandma and greatgrandma and auntie and 2 uncles and 3 cousins. Or any of the other possible living arrangements which the vast majority of the world population experiences. The nuclear family is an odd little anomaly in the big picture of human families. As for me, I'm not divorced and my child loves his non-nuclear family, so I'm always thrilled to find toys and books that reflect that.

What mjoe said... Plus, when I was a mid-sized tot, I used to use my vast numbers of Fisher Price people to enact complicated family sagas. There was one divorce (I lost one man and had to explain him away somehow) plus twins, marriages, cousinly rivalries, ethnic outsiders (the Three Bears were Jewish and had adopted shiksa Goldilocks), and great drama on all sides. There was at least one family where three generations lived together; but one of the daughters married up and was seen by the other sisters as snooty in her Marx tin-litho tract house.

This is what I came up with, in the safety of my nuclear family, living in the most boringly conventional small town in California. Comes from watching too much PBS...

(Before anyone jumps on me for racism, I should add that much of my family was/is Jewish in blond, Anglo California, so whatever I was enacting with toys who looked different, it was my own little internal issue, not my views of people unlike myself.)

What I would like to see is doll house families that are multiracial! I've always hated that I have to choose between a white family or a black family. There's no mixing and matching.... as our family has sucessfully done in real life. I'm always tempted to buy a doll family and paint them!