Princess Role Playing

The Disney Princesses are role models for many young girls.  They are involved in the lives of these girls through movies, music, books, toys, clothes, decoration, kitchenware and much more.  Their stories and songs are memorized and harbored in the minds of children as how they are supposed to act and what their lives will be like: perfect and beautiful, with a happily ever after.  

In the storylines of the early Disney Princess movies the princesses always seem to be “women-in-waiting”.  Sure they have small problems that need to be dealt with, but there is nothing too big that a cheerful song can not fix, and the grand solution to all problems is Prince Charming.  The movies show that all a girl needs in her life is a rich man to make her happy.  Her purpose is to wait around until he finds her, and spend the rest of her life fulfilling his needs.  This can be a problem for young girls of the 21^st century.  The target age of Disney Princess merchandise is ages 3-5 (Wohlwend, 1), which is a very impressionable age.  This merchandise (Figure 1), or “Princess Culture”, includes everything from Snow White eating utensils to Pocahontas bath soap.  It can be very confusing for girls to have an influence as strong as Disney in one ear preaching dependence on men and money, and having the entire modern society in the other ear telling them they can be independent and just as powerful and influential as men.

Fig. 1 Princess Merchandise in The Disney Store

Princess culture also influences how young girls interact with one another.  Using toys or just “playing pretend”, princess play can instigate a sort of social hierarchy among children.  Disney makes all of their princesses unrealistically beautiful, thus causing young girls who want to play to choose only the prettiest/cutest girl as the lead role, the role of the princess.  This is most often the best and most prized character, and it gives whoever is chosen a sort of power, even outside of playtime.  Many times young kids will start a game, or scenario, that will last for days.  A girl who is cast as the princess can become the most popular little girl in the group, the one whose hand all the little boys want to hold.  This leaves the other girls roles such as the “ugly stepsisters” or the “evil stepmothers”.  Even after the game is over it is pretty unlikely that the popularity positions will change.  Those who were chosen as princesses will continue to be princesses in the next game, and so on, and the girls who are not so popular will be pushed to the wayside, ignored, or picked on.  Sometimes just playing pretend gives an outcast child a not-so-happily every after.