I worried that playing with Barbie dolls would hurt my kids' self-esteem. But to them, she's just a toy.

• When I learned my mom had saved my Barbie dolls, I worried about letting my daughter play with them.
• I was concerned that playing with Barbies would negatively affect her self esteem.

A few years ago, on a visit to my parents' house, my mom emerged from the attic with a box filled to the brim with my old Barbies. The dolls were in varying condition, from like-new to well-loved to victimized-by-puppy-teeth.

The miniature clothing put my own closet to shame: there were lacy wedding gowns, a lifeguard swimsuit, stretchy workout outfits, cocktail dresses, business blazers. And then, of course, there were the accessories. Tiny plastic shoes in every color imaginable. Handbags. Jewelry. Tennis rackets. A camera. There was even a Ken (yes, he counts as an accessory).

As I was going through the box, visceral memories that had formed decades ago in my childhood bedroom came flooding in. All the times I would make my younger brother play with me, the way the green glow-in-the-dark stars contrasted against the pink fabric of the Dream Glow dress, how you'd have to bend a plastic arm to get certain outfits to fit just right. It turned out that my mom had saved all of my Barbies for decades, and was finally giving them to me so I could pass them down to my own kids to create similar memories when I was ready.

I wanted to thoughtfully introduce Barbie to my daughter

But I wasn't sure when I'd be ready to hand all this down — my daughter was not yet five and I worried about her playing with my old dolls, which, when I was growing up, only came in one body type: tall and thin. And as a young mother grappling with balancing work and motherhood who had read one too many articles on "having it all," I needed time to think about how I was going to thoughtfully introduce Barbie — who supposedly signified that you could be anything — to my daughter, who I didn't want to feel the pressure women so often feel to be everything.

My American Girl doll was a different kind of hand-me-down. American Girls are, well, girls; they're girls from history, to boot. Barbie, on the other hand, is a grown woman. If American Girl dolls were a playful way of looking into the past, for kids, Barbie dolls were an imaginative way of looking into the future. And I wasn't sure I was ready for my daughter to imagine an adult life through this specific lens.

When I finally gave my kids the dolls, they loved them

A few years passed. My daughter got a little older, and my husband and I had a son. One day during a particularly rainy vacation, I found myself pulling out the Barbie bin. The kids proceeded to play for hours with them on the beach. The Barbies went swimming in the Atlantic, they climbed trees, they took on action figures. It turned out that my kids loved playing with them together so much that a few months later, they asked for a few more to round out their collection for Christmas. (I drew the line at the massive, pricey Dreamhouse.)

Over the next few months, they played almost exclusively with Barbies. They created an entire commune made up of a mix of my 30-year-old Barbies and their new ones: dolls of different races, sizes, professions, and ages, all living together in varying family makeups in the cubed storage system in our playroom.

As they played with the same dolls my brother and I had played with decades ago, plus their new additions, I felt sentimental at the idea that one day maybe their kids would play with them, too, and have this shared experience that transcended generations.

My children didn't care how Barbie looked, they just wanted to play

I realized as I watched them building their Barbie world that maybe I had put too much weight on this toy and on the "idea" of Barbie — my kids simply wanted to play make-believe together with plastic human dolls they could dress. After all, isn't that why I had played with Barbies as a kid? I, too, had loved imagining being an adult, choosing my own outfits, deciding which job I was going to do that day, and the independence that came with all that.

And although the Barbie of the 80s had a long way to go as far as inclusivity, the Barbies of today had made a bit of progress, and allowed my kids to play make-believe in a world that looked a little more like their own.

One day while they were playing with their Barbies, the kids called me over. They were pretending that one of the dolls was coming home from the hospital with her twin babies and they wanted me to be her. As I played the familiar role of doting new mom, I realized that in all my worrying, I had done the thing that we adults are so good at doing: I had forgotten what it was like to be a kid. I had forgotten how to play.