5-Year-Old Opens Collectible Barbies And Her Dad Reacts With Major Meltdown. Is He Wrong?

"This year, our daughter turned 5," she wrote. "For her birthday, we got her a new bed and redesigned her room. My husband decided to put all of the collector dolls on shelves for 'decoration'. I told him this was a mistake. Even though she’s 5, she doesn’t quite get the difference between these and her regular, playable barbies."

It's a fair point. If anyone's been around a 5-year-old before, they should know that their minds aren't on money and proper investments. They're on playing and having a fun time. Aside from those dolls being in a box while her other Barbies were out in the open, how would she know that they were special if they were in her room?

"Even after we explained it to her, she was asking when they could come out of the box," she continued. "My husband still insisted they’d be fine. She barely plays in her room anyway, she has a playroom. I said fine, but I know if they get ruined, he’ll be crushed."

"We had another baby last year," she continued. "I was trying to get him to calm down the other day and my daughter was making a lot of noise. I asked her to take some toys into her room and play quietly. She said okay." You probably know where this is going.

"When I went to check on her 15 minutes later, she had managed to get a collector Barbie off the shelf, torn the box and had severely damaged the Barbie by trying to get it out of the wires," the original poster (OP) wrote. As expected, her husband went nuts. At the very least, it was just one — but it sounds like the situation was a little traumatic for their young daughter.

"My husband was so mad at her," she said. "I told him he had no right to be, because she’s still too young to get it. I said they were sentimental and it’ll take time for her to get that she can’t play with toys we put in her room." The question should be, why weren't they stored elsewhere?

But here's the issue. The husband more or less pointed his wife out for the wrongdoing. "My husband said I was an [expletive] for not backing him up and that I was making excuses for her," she said. "I took all the dolls out of the room and said she’d get them back when she was older. My daughter feels so bad and I hate that my husband set her up to feel this way. He’s calmed down but still thinks I’m wrong for not getting upset with her."

First things first — nobody should ever get mad at someone else for not sharing emotions, especially regarding parenting. While you need to be a united team when it comes to decision-making, the wife isn't in the wrong for understanding why her daughter would want to play with the Barbies. Having the husband fault her for having a different perspective is a bit cruel.

Especially since, as many Redditors pointed out, he was the one who chose to display them after being told the possible consequences. "Your husband needs a reality check and an education book on child development," Redditor TheLadyEve wrote. "Children that age do not understand 'sentimental value' when it comes to toys…From young kids' perspectives, toys are for playing."

Others very easily related to the situation her daughter was in. "My dad had a really expensive porcelain three wise men set that he got in the Middle East while he was a merchant marine," PinkLemonade15 said. "He also had a collection of those porcelain dolls. My brother and I destroyed them because we thought they were all toys. We did not understand at the time why my dad was so upset."

When something is continuously out for display, it's easy for kids to think that it's fair game to touch. It's horrific for parents to realize that their precious items have been destroyed, but it's also on them. They're the ones who know the emotional value, and they should know when something should be out of reach for curious children.

Redditor magic-school-bus could also relate to the fact that these were collector Barbies. "My grandma bought me Barbie Christmas ornaments for key years in my life," they wrote. "They are out of the box. They are worth substantially less. But in my life, as an adult, each year I take them out and put them on the tree and explain them to friends, they are worth so much. I saw the value as a kid out of the box, but they mean so much more to me out of the box because I associate them with my now deceased grandma and grandpa." That's a healthy way of thinking about it.

Obviously, the husband in this situation can think fondly of his sister when he sees the Barbies being played again. The dolls were, according to OP, being held for her own daughter to play with someday. But since she died prior to having kids, OP's daughter had inherited them.

Redditor Landeg feels like that's a big part of the problem. "I think the husband obviously wants to display the dolls in some way because they're sentimental to him, not to his daughter, but he doesn't feel comfortable displaying them for himself (take your pick of reasons why) so he uses his doll-loving daughter as an excuse to have them out so he can see them," they wrote. "Dude needs to understand that he can't use his daughter as an excuse/shield to display his both sentimentally and fiscally valuable Barbie dolls if it's not what his daughter wants."

Suffice to say, not many people sided with the husband. While grieving takes many forms, he should have realized what was going to happen. Hopefully, his daughter now knows how her dad values the dolls and won't open the rest of them — but they never should have been displayed in her room to begin with.