Should Some Sort Of Age Limit Be Imposed Regarding The Sale Of Gore-Themed Dolls?

I think there should be age limits, in that most people too young for these dolls also don't have the funds in their names to buy them. But that doesn't mean that they can't ask their parents if it's okay, for them to work off and save allowance towards or get said dolls for birthdays/Christmas/whatever. And then it's in the parents' hands whether that's a spending decision that the family can make.

I also agree heartily with Quoth-- every kid is different, and every family will therefore be making these decisions differently.

 

This reminds me of how my mother de-sensitized me when I was little. She would take me to Halloween stores because it was my FAVORITE holiday before Christmas and there was some thing's that scared me. She reminded me they were all pretend and asked me which I thought looked silly and which I thought looked spooky. And some had little 'haunted houses' set up with their products.. I would go through again and again until I memorized it. Then I was always the first to charge into locally done haunted houses when my friends were scared to death. Their folks instilled in them fear of things new or different but my folks basically said: "I will be here when you fall, I will protect you no matter what. Show no fear." And whilst some thing's terrify me still and still make me nervous...Well I won't surround myself in it.

I live in a real haunted house. I have less worries of my zombie doll scaring me then an apparition appearing.

 

Re desensitizing children to imaginary horrors: I think that's important, too.

I grew up in 'the vampire house', as I like to tell people. My father was a tremendous horror buff. He didn't hide scary stuff from us (though we always had the option of not watching a movie that might be too much), and I agree with much of how he introduced us to it. He started with the older/sillier things, as I recall, and told us when we should cover our eyes if we didn't want to see, and he told us all about moviemaking. He told us how the blood and the monsters were made. He told us that such-and-such was a very nice man off-camera, that so-and-so pioneered some effect or technique... He taught us the language of film, so that we had a context to view them in that wasn't terrifying.

He was also very comforting when things did scare me, and he took my child-fears seriously. He helped me de-fang them, and showed me how to enjoy the ghoulish, which I've always felt to be a very sensible way of handling kids and scary stuff. If I'd hated it, he wouldn't have pushed it on me, but it always had a draw for me, and he introduced me at my pace to those movies and books.

There were still a couple of movies that terrified me, and up until I was twelve or thirteen I couldn't stand the sight of blood even knowing how it was made out of corn syrup and food coloring. But I could also laugh at horror! And I could love monsters. I developed an incredible empathy for the monsters, really, because I was very much an outsider as a child, and so are they.