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John Long

Recent columns

• Assault on religious liberty
• Some people need firing
• You missed the boat; too bad
• Christmas during war

From the RoundTable blog

'Twas the night before Christmas, and like parents across the country we were up late stuffing stockings, arranging a photogenic display under the tree, and trying to comprehend the various gifts for which some assembly was required. While struggling to open an obsessively packaged toy, my wife made an interesting and unanticipated discovery.

(Whatever happened to just pulling toys out of the box? Must everything be hermetically sealed in multiple layers of sharp plastic, secured with confounding twist ties, and in some cases screwed to the packaging? Must daddies risk trips to the emergency room for stitches every birthday and Christmas? Am I right, parents?)

But back to the story. My wife was assembling a doll house for our 3-year-old daughter, complete with furnishings, pets, a minivan and, of course, the affiliated family. As she extricated the Mommy and Daddy dolls from the almost impervious packaging, she noticed painted on their left hands, very obviously and very deliberately, matching wedding rings.

Kudos to the Fisher Price toy company! Maybe I'm reading too much into the design of a toy, but we appreciated that little flourish. Someone in the planning stage made the deliberate decision to marry these two off, not merely stick them together to keep house. Had the dolls not been so adorned we probably never would have noticed, but the tiny stripes of gold paint applied around tiny plastic fingers made us very satisfied customers. They speak volumes about the type of family that will live in the sprawling pink Victorian with the green plastic roof.

The couple's rings, of course, won't come off. (Not a bad idea. Tattooed wedding bands. Much harder to throw into a drawer and forget.) The jewelry means in the idyllic world of the playroom that Daddy's going to stay there at the house, change the oil in the minivan, help raise the pink-clad twins and the baby dinosaur the couple soon adopted from another toy set. Mommy is going to keep cooking dinner, strapping the kiddos into their car seats, reminding Daddy that the Lego wall someone put across one of the rooms for no discernible reason needs repair.

Now some of you are saying, "So? What's the big deal about a married toy couple?" Others are thinking, "What antediluvian claptrap -- a toy company enforcing its old-fashioned morality on kids." You're right -- it's not very tolerant for the modern world. Maybe Fisher-Price can market a set that reflects current American society more accurately. The father doll could be pre-programmed to abandon all responsibility and move in with Barbie after a while. The company could then periodically ship a revolving series of substitute dads. And after a few years, they can mail a counselor to deal with the traumatized twins.

Harsh? Probably. But in fact we live in a world that for some 40 years has preached that the happiness of the parents is paramount; that a father is an elective and not particularly useful accessory to the doll house; that any figure can come along and fulfill the daddy role if dad decides to move on with his life. And if the pink twins suffer the consequences, it's polite not to mention it to the parents.

Of course I know that every family doesn't get to live out the ideal nuclear model. Marriages end. Sometimes they should. And there are plenty of well-adjusted kids of unmarried parents. But then, not every student gets straight A's, and not every driver has a ticket-free record. Shouldn't the ideal be something we encourage, with little things like married dolls in the playroom?

There's just something about those wedding rings that makes a difference to a family's stability. Not long ago, a British study suggested that married couples who had a child (or unmarried parents who wed sometime afterward) tended overwhelmingly to still be together when the child was a teenager. Only a small percentage of unwed, co-habiting couples were still together 15 years later. I don't know the equivalent American numbers, but I can't imagine they're much different.

I'm glad the toy company made this tiny little statement about the nuclear family. I'm glad Mr. Fisher married Ms. Price before they set up housekeeping, and that they chose to signify their commitment with a meaningful jewelry choice. I hope they have many happy years together. Except my daughter has already misplaced Mommy and one of the twins.

Long, a Roanoke Times columnist, is director of the Salem Museum and teaches history at Roanoke College.