While qualifications and experience will remain at the top of the checklist for employers when selecting new hires or promotions, empathy and social skills have been shown to be key attributes for future jobs and leadership skills, particularly as we continue to negotiate our way out of the Covid pandemic.
For some, learning these new soft skills has meant a completely different way of working, while others have found this is a skillset which can be encouraged and developed from a very young age – and it may surprise you to find the answer does not lie at the click of a button, from a mobile phone, tablet or app.
A study by leading academics and experts in their field at the Centre for Human Developmental Science at Cardiff University Cardiff University, and Barbie, from Mattel, in 2020, ‘Exploring the benefits of Doll Play through Neuroscience’, analysed the impact doll play has on children, finding that it activates brain regions that allow children to develop empathy and social information processing skills, even when playing by themselves.
In short, the research suggested that playing with dolls encourages children to consider the thoughts and feelings of others. Doll play encourages language about others’ thoughts and emotions and has the potential to nurture social and emotional processing skills.
There is an argument to suggest adults could also benefit greatly from such outcomes, but these are skills that are particularly important to foster for children during a critical period of development.
After all, empathy plays a key role in predicting kids’ well-being, academic success, authentic happiness, relationship satisfaction, as well as their ability to have resilience and bounce back from adversity. And as bullying and prejudice plague kids (and adults) the world over, how we could all benefit from an antidote of empathy.
The study investigated the importance of what kids say while they play and found an increased use of language used by children about others’ thoughts and emotions during doll play. When compared to tablet play, this form of pretend play when playing alone showed more signs of internal state language (ISL), meaning that when children create imaginary worlds and role play with dolls, they communicated more about others’ thoughts, emotions, and perspectives – putting themselves in the shoes of others.
During doll play, children in the study attributed internal states to their dolls while playing alone as they enacted roles with the dolls and verbalised phrases such as: ‘Thank you for coming over to my house, do you want a sleepover?’, and as a part of their pretend stories: ‘There’s a mermaid… hurt and they’re tired’. They also vocalised queries in the second person regarding where toys should be placed: ‘Where do you think this should go?’
According to researchers, this use of internal state language while playing with dolls further supports findings that doll play, even when children are playing by themselves, may have positive effects on children, such as driving higher rates of social and emotional processing and building social skills like empathy that can become internalised to build and form lifelong habits.
Though children may have experienced reduced cognitive and social stimulation outside of their homes over the past two years, doll play offers the opportunity to emulate scenes and interactions from their daily lives. Children mimic what they see their parents, teachers or peers do, as well as what they see in the media, and dolls give them a great opportunity to recreate what they’ve seen and think about it and process it in a new way.
Parents might have not always recognised doll play as an obvious developmental toy, like puzzles or construction toys, or in today’s uber-technology-focused world the aforementioned apps and general internet, but these results suggest that playing with dolls, such as Barbie, could have a positive impact on a child’s emotional and social processing skills, regardless of the child’s gender.
Maybe it’s time for us to ditch those devices, if only for a short while, and harness our inner child; grab (or kindly borrow) that doll and discover, through play, those soft skills that are coming so naturally to the next generation of leaders and innovators.