Cabbage Patch Kids

The Cabbage Patch Kids doll-craze was an unprecedented phenomenon among children and their parents that swept America during the 1980s, reflecting, perhaps, the cultural leanings of an era intent on expressing family values. By comparison with the Cabbage Patch collecting mania, later collectors of the mass-marketed Beanie Babies, Tamogotchis, and Tickle Me Elmos in the 1990s had it easy.

The 16-inch, soft-bodied Cabbage Patch dolls, the ultimate "must have" toy, were in such high demand during the 1983 Christmas season that the $25 retail Kids were "adopted" on the black market for fees as high as $2,000. Toy manufacturer Coleco Industries never expected that their homely, one-of-a-kind Kids—complete with birth certificates and adoption papers—would be the impetus behind department-store stampedes across the country, resulting in sales of over six million dolls during their first nine months on the market.

Xavier Roberts, a dollmaker in Columbus, Georgia, began "adopting" his Little People—soft-sculpture, handmade Cabbage Patch prototypes—out of Babyland General Hospital in 1979. Roberts' gimmicks—from adoption papers and pledges, to hiring "doctors" and "nurses" to deliver dolls from Babyland's indoor Cabbage Patch every few minutes to the delight of visitors—won his company, Original Appalachian Artworks, a licensing deal with Coleco in late 1982. By the late 1980s, Roberts' hand-signed Little People were worth up to 60 times their original $75-200 cost. When Coleco filed for bankruptcy in May 1988, Mattel (one of the manufacturers who had passed on licensing rights to the dolls in 1982) took over the Cabbage Patch license.

The mythos that Roberts created for his Cabbage Patch Kids—born from a cabbage patch, stork-delivered, and happy to be placed with whatever family would take them—encouraged the active participation of parents and children alike, and fostered strong faith in the power of fantasy, but the American public's reaction to the dolls was anything but imaginary. By virtue of their homely, one-of-a-kind identities, and the solemnity with which buyers were swearing to adoption pledges (due in no small part to the dolls' scarcity), Cabbage Patch Kids became arguably the most humanized playthings in toy history: some "parents" brought their dolls to restaurants, high chair and all, or paid babysitters to watch them, just as they would have done for real children.

The psychological and social effects of the Kids of the Cabbage Patch world were mixed. Adoption agencies and support groups were divided over the advantages and disadvantages that the dolls offered their "parents." On one hand, they complained that the yarn-haired dolls both desensitized the agony that parents feel in giving children up for adoption, and objectified adoptees as commodities acquired as easily as one purchases a cabbage. On the other hand, psychologists such as Joyce Brothers argued that the dolls helped children and adults alike to understand that we do not have to be attractive in order to be loved. The dolls, proponents argued, helped erase the stigma that many adopted children were feeling before the Kids came along.

When before Cabbage Patch Kids did American mass-market toy consumers demand one-of-a-kind, personalized playthings? Who since Xavier Roberts has been at once father, creator, publicist, and CEO of his own Little "Family"? Cabbage Patch Kids' popularity hinged on a few fundamental characteristics: a supercomputer that ensured that no two Kids had the same hair/eye/freckle/name combination, Roberts' autograph of authenticity stamped on each Cabbage tush, an extended universe of over 200 Cabbage-licensed products, and the sad truth that there were never enough of them to go around.

—Daryna M. McKeand

Further Reading:

Hoffman, William. Fantasy: The Incredible Cabbage Patch Phenomenon. Dallas, Taylor Publishing, 1984.

Sheets, Kenneth R., and Pamela Sherrid. "From Cabbage to Briar Patch." U.S. News and World Report. July 25, 1988, 48.