Meet The Dolls Changing Children’s Lives

From a Newcastle living room to a Wisconsin kitchen table, one woman’s dolls are reshaping childhood for kids like Isla — offering comfort, confidence and a powerful reminder that they belong.

PRIMER, 2020

Jacinta Stonestreet recalls with perfect clarity the moment her daughter Isla took her first steps. She remembers Isla’s jagged, tottering progress across the room, the determination in her daughter’s big brown eyes, and the satisfied smile that spread across her face as she reached her mother, and lifted up her chubby hands in excitement.

The day a toddler takes her first steps is always momentous, but for Jacinta, it was particularly memorable, as Isla was born without the lower half of her right leg, and her first steps were taken with the aid of a prosthetic.

Nearly two years later, Isla can run, dance and scooter as well as any three-year-old. Like many pre-schoolers, she loves Frozen, Barbie and anything that comes in the colour pink. “She’s got a good sense of humour,” says Jacinta, raising her eyebrows towards her daughter, who is, at that moment, skipping around the family’s living room in Newcastle in a pink tutu sprinkled with diamantes. “She’s pretty much like any other little girl.”

Jacinta didn’t always allow herself to imagine such a rosy future. When an ultrasound revealed, in-utero, that Isla was missing a leg, Jacinta was devastated. ““I thought, ‘I can’t do this,’” she tells me matter-of-factly. It was only later, once she’d realised that Isla would be otherwise unaffected, that she “clicked into reality”.

After the ultrasound, Isla was diagnosed with Amniotic Band Syndrome, where strands of the amniotic sac wrap themselves around limbs, cutting off blood supply and causing amputation. It’s rare and completely random, but Isla will otherwise grow up to be a healthy child.

In the months that followed, as Jacinta, a property manager, researched her daughter’s condition, she stumbled across something (or someone) that would bring comfort to both her and Isla in years to come. In the US, she discovered a dollmaker who created handmade dolls for children with physical differences, called A Doll Like Me. Jacinta ordered one of the dolls, and when it arrived 18 months later, it looked exactly like Isla, with brown hair, brown eyes and a prosthetic leg. “Isla and I sat in the kitchen and opened [the package], and she just looked at it and took the leg off straightaway.” …