Many reborn owners are simply doll collectors, while others have experienced miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death, have no means for adoption, or suffer from empty nest syndrome. They may utilize the dolls as a substitute for a child. Some owners dress the dolls, wash their hair, and may even take them for walks in strollers and take them shopping. Reborn hobbyists refer to the emotional response to holding their dolls as cuddle therapy. For grieving parents who form emotional bonds with reborn dolls, contend that they are not replacing children but remembering them.
Reborning
Any type of vinyl doll can be used for reborning. Dolls vary by size, shape, and materials, making some more desirable or popular than other babies, it is because the dolls already resemble human babies in their expressions, body shapes, surface materials, and other lifelike attributes.
Kits
A reborn can be created from a blank kit as opposed to reborning a whole manufactured doll. Manufacturers have reacted to the growing trend of artists transforming dolls by hiring reborn artists to become doll sculptors and design doll molds and kits. There are also many independent sculptors who create their own line of kits. Sculptor will trade mark their work, by imprinting the back of the neck or neck flange with information identifying the kit. Realborns are a type of blank kit for reborning that are made by taking 3D digital scans of a real baby instead of an artist sculpting by hand. These are usually newborns, sometimes they produce a kit of the same baby again at 3 or 7 months. The kits come as a disassembled blank baby ready to be reborned.