By: Maria Lúcia Soares Bueno (Golden Ladies)

The world seems to be increasingly turning upside down. Every day a new trend appears that makes us wonder what is happening to humanity.

Of course we know what human beings are capable of doing in terms of evilness: remembering Christians being put in arenas to be eaten by lions and what Hitler subjected the Jews to, for example.

But in terms of doing bizarre things, ‘We’ are always surprising.

As many may have seen, the media, the trend now is to have a reborn baby to call your own child, and treat it as if it were alive. People create layettes, strollers, clothes changes, bottle feedings, medical appointments and even birthday records for the dolls.

Brazilian psychologist, Daniela Bittar, a specialist in perinatal grief, explains that it is not yet possible to say whether there is in fact, an increase in the number of people with some type of affective dysfunction, projecting feelings and attributing meanings to the dolls, beyond what would be considered healthy or if the phenomenon merely reflects a consumer trend, a search for attention on social media or even a specific section that has gained visibility and gives the impression of being more common than it is.

It is worth considering that, for some, it may be a hobby like any other.

A big issue with this type of relationship, would be the desire to nurture relationships in which we have total control: I can project love, I can avoid rejection, etc. This becomes a big problem when excessive appeal develops as we have seen certain absurdities in social media.

We need to think that perhaps ‘we live in a world where no one looks at each other anymore, where people feel so lonely, that they start to relate to no human forms’.  We have examples beyond reborn babies: men who relate to dolls, people who treat artificial intelligence as their best friend, women who have Alexia as their confidant.

But according to this same psychologist, in some cases, reborn babies can be used to help in specific therapeutic processes such as prenatal anxiety, perinatal grief or in elderly people with Alzheimer’s.

Used with common sense and parsimony, these babies may even have an important function.

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