"Going Home" Barbie

[Guest beachangels]

Please explain to me why it is that Mattel is not making their "Going Home" Barbies accessible to all parents who have adopted children from China. Please don't get me wrong, to provide them as a gift to adoptive families has been a lovely gesture. However, there have been periods during which the dolls were not provided - I was at the White Swan adopting my daughter during one of those periods, May of 2000.

 

I know that Mattel has been approached by petition about making these dolls available for sale, at a reasonable price, to adoptive families who did not recieve them. I am aware that on rare occasion they are available on EBay and such, but the prices are tremendously high - $200 or more - and not accessible to many of us, especially single parents such as myself.

 

I would once again implore Mattel to reconsider this decision. Everyone I know who would like to have one would be more than happy to send a copy of their adoption papers or whatever Mattel would need as proof, as well as pay a reasonable sum.

 

This is not a matter of some mid-aged vintage Barbie collector who might be a little disappointed about not being able to find a collector's doll from twenty or thirty years ago. This is a much larger, much more human issue... and I'm not sure Mattel really thought through the implications of this when they decided to issue these dolls - and issue them sporadically - in the first place.

 

Our children are children for whom it is fundamentally important that they are given tools by which they can begin to reconstruct and make sense of their lives - past and present. These dolls have given many girls an outlet for doing that - especially girls such as my own daughter who are particularly fond of Barbies. This is about little girls who have seen their friends with these dolls and are too young to understand why Santa can't bring them one of these dolls that 'look just like Mommy and me'..... and as such it is truly a black eye on the face of Mattel's consideration and respect for children - the very customers they strive to serve.

 

This is about simply not wanting to see tears on our daughter's faces thinking they were somehow not worthly of receiving this doll when others were - these are children who are growing up with enough issues that will cause them to question their worth.

 

I can understand that these dolls are a limited edition for adoptive parents, but we ARE adoptive parents and we have no way to acquire them, and that simply isn't fair. I implore Mattel to reconsider this inhumane decision. And please don't reply with a polite answer that you're sorry and you hope we'll continue to buy other Barbies. If that's all I can glean from this, I'd really rather not have an answer at all. Thank you.

 

Susan