“It represents her in play” parental and child views on toys that represent disability

Abstract

Toys representing disability are now commercially available, yet there has been limited exploration of parental perspectives on these toys. This study explored parents’ and carers’ views of toys that represented disability through a pre-registered online survey of N = 83 parents of children aged between 0 and 14 years old. In a repeated measures design, parents viewed images of commercially available toys. We measured their child’s previous direct contact with a disabled person, their perceived likelihood that their child would enjoy playing with that toy, and parents’ open-ended views on why they thought their child would or would not enjoy that toy. We found that significantly more parents of older disabled children and younger non-disabled children thought their child would choose to play with representative dolls. Open-ended responses indicated that this finding may have occurred because parents of disabled children (vs non-disabled children) valued the representation afforded by the toys. In this way, we show that parents value representation and accessibility particularly when they are a parent of a disabled child themselves. Our study highlights when parents may bring disability-representative toys into the toy box in ways that promote inclusion.