by Heidi Green
August 09, 2009

Bebé Glotón. If you’ve been around pop culture media coverage or parenting blogs in the past week, you probably already know that the name should (apparently) strike fear into your heart. After all, Bebé Glotón isn’t just any old baby doll. No, it is a breastfed baby doll. Can you imagine anything more (as MSNBC.com puts it) “creepy”? Or, as the women of ABC’s The View suggested, inappropriate?

About the doll
The Bebé Glotón was developed by Berjuan, a Spanish toy company. The doll, clad in a pink-and-white sleeper and cap, looks like many other baby dolls on the market. However, it comes with a unique accessory: A patterned halter top for the child, with large flowers stitched onto the left and right sides of the chest. It also comes with an unusual ability: When its mouth is placed to either flower, the doll alternately cries and emits a sort of sucking sound for an unspecified period of time, until the girl-mother “burps” it.

It’s harmless
In spite of Dr. Nancy Snyderman’s observation otherwise, the Bebé Glotón probably does not “set back feminism 150 years.” Does such a claim even make sense for a product that is currently only available in one country worldwide? Although Dr. Manny Alvarez, managing health editor of FOXNews.com equates the doll with “introducing sex education in first grade instead of seventh or eighth grade” and says that it could “inadvertently lead little girls to become traumatized,” it’s hard to imagine such a case. After all, breastfeeding is not sex. What’s more, even breastfeeding—which this doll does a very poor job of simulating—is just an act of feeding. It’s not traumatizing.

Little girls pretending (very inaccurately, but we’ll get to that below) to feed and care for baby dolls. That’s not so shocking, is it?

Will you buy it?
I am all for breastfeeding. I am all for positive parenting. It should be no surprise that I all but cheered out loud when my toddler firstborn positioned his beloved moose in our baby sling, pulled the strap as tight as he could, and walked his “baby” around. Or that I applauded internally when he sat down next to me and pulled his sister’s baby doll into his lap as I breastfed her. Or that, when my daughter approached me as I breastfed her younger brother and told me that I needed to “nurse” her baby (lobster) too, I reminded her that mothers “nurse” their babies and who was lobster’s mother? Yes, I was pleased when she, too, set about meeting the needs of her pretend baby.

So why, you might wonder, won’t I buy the Bebé Glotón? After all, my third child Sam will celebrate his second birthday next month, and that’s the same age at which his siblings demonstrated their fine parenting skills.

Frankly, the strange baby doll and halter top seem too far from natural and too unimaginative for my family. Oh yes, my kids are the ones who understand that babies actually go under their mothers’ shirts—not on strange flowers they find on top of two layers of fabric—in order to breastfeed. They are the ones who explain to their friends “that’s how babies feed” and even, amazingly, that “sick babies want to nurse more.”

What’s more, they’re the ones who use their imaginations to turn a pair of small plastic frogs into wig-wearing mavens by perching popped corn on their amphibian noggins. They replace the popcorn with tiny, dime-machine clear plastic domes; the frogs are astronauts. They’re the ones who decide that a foreboding pirate ship is, for this trip at least, a glamorous princess voyage. Next time, it’s a boat about to take on Niagara Falls. In short, my kids are the ones who use their imaginations. And their parents are the ones who encourage them to do so.

In my opinion, children don’t need Bebé Glotón to breastfeed their “babies.” Children have been doing so for ages! Here’s my wish: May they do so for ages hence—without the strange, simulated suckling noises and fake, incorrect feeding cues.

Editor’s Note—July 19, 2011
Berjuan has announced plans to bring Bebé Glotón to the U.S. market, starting with the ASD tradeshow in Las Vegas on July 31, 2011.