Lydia Yaffe of San Francisco has two girls, ages 5 and 8. She doesn't quite remember when her older daughter first asked for a Bratz doll, but she estimates it was when she was 5. Currently, she says they have a "minimum" of 12 Barbies and eight Bratz each.

"Well, the oldest, she started out with Barbie and then with ..." Yaffe pauses. "Can I say this? With the sluttier Bratz," she said, noting that her parents' generation probably thought the same of her Barbie dolls. "The way I look at it, it's Barbie evolving into the new millennium."

Like many parents, Yaffe will be weighing a multitude of toy choices during the holiday shopping season. While she personally doesn't love the Bratz, she won't stop buying them.

But the choice between Bratz and Barbie is more than just kid stuff. Over the past five years, the toy industry has been watching an epic catfight: Mattel Corp.'s Barbie, the world's most successful toy by any standard, has been battling MGA Entertainment's heavy-lidded, scantily-dressed Bratz to hold onto its dominance in the doll world.

In 2005, global sales of Bratz and related products climbed to $2 billion, or 40 percent of the fashion doll market, and Barbie took a hit. This year Barbie sales are back up, largely because Mattel is marketing specialty Barbie lines such as "12 Dancing Princesses" and "Fairytopia" along with film and live-stage-show tie-ins.

But the popularity of the sexy Bratz and Barbie's move to recapture younger consumers by emphasizing fairies and princesses underscore two sides of the cultural phenomenon known to sociologists as "age compression" and to toy industry marketers as "KGOY," or Kids Growing Older Younger.

For generations, parents have been wailing "they're growing up so fast," while, according to many academics and psychologists, the smallest among us are being exposed to more and more adult themes at younger ages.

When Barbie debuted in 1959, the target audience was 9- to 12-year-olds. Today, Chuck Scothon, president of Mattel's Barbie division, emphasizes the multiple incarnations of the brand - "I always say, there's a Barbie girl for every age" - but says that "Barbie toy strength is cornerstone for ages 3 to 7."

According to advertising expert Jean Kilbourne, the declining age of consumers of Barbie speaks to an unprecedented cultural shift. "This is a whole different ballgame," Kilbourne says, reached at her home in Massachusetts. She is the co-author, with psychology Professor Diane Levin, of the forthcoming "So Sexy, So Soon: The Sexualization of Childhood."

"Never before in history have little children been so sexually precocious, made to care so much about appearance - asking how they look, how much they weigh. It's impossible, or at least, extremely difficult, to study," says Kilbourne, "because there's no control group. It's difficult to find a group that isn't exposed to media."

For older girls, it's not the Barbie doll but media products - the electronics, the movies, the Web site - that keep her relevant, according to Scothon.

For the slightly younger crowd - entering grade school - there needed to be something new, Bratz, which debuted in 2001.

MGA Entertainment gives credit for the dolls' success to the company's willingness to absorb and reflect what girls say they want in a fashion doll. Bratz have heavily made-up faces and puffy lips. They are slightly shorter and wider than Barbies, with smaller breasts, although the size of their heads relative to their bodies echoes the underfed look of young stars such as Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie, who have often been singled out as looking as if they have an eating disorder.

Those critical of Bratz and Barbies for younger girls point to a few sources of concern. One is the "structured play" that these dolls provide, as opposed to more open-ended imaginative play.

"What you play is looking pretty, being an object," says Levin, who has written extensively on child development, "the Bratz feet come off to try on shoes. Her body is an eating-disordered body - and all you do is focus on appearance, or doing things that focus on looking good, like going to a fashion show or going to the Bratz mall."

"It programs them to do stuff they can't understand and we don't want them to understand - being sexy. They learn the appearance of sexy before they know what it means."

A 2000 study commissioned by the Girl Scouts of America called "Teens Before Their Time" concluded that "Physically, girls' bodies are maturing earlier than ever before. Cognitively, they are acquiring information about the world at an accelerated pace. ... The dilemma is that these same girls do not have the emotional maturity, nor do they have the information, to match their accelerated aspirations and expectations."

Kay Hymowitz, a Manhattan Institute Fellow who has written extensively on education and childhood in America, is concerned with the direct path marketers have to children.

"What marketers know and what parents forget, is that kids want to grow up fast."

When Hymowitz published "Ready or Not: What Happens When We Treat Children As Small Adults" in 2000, she had dire predictions about children growing up too fast, which she tempers given declines in youth violence and early sexual activity in the United States in the past few years. Still, she doesn't want to let marketers "off the hook completely."

"We have successfully made kids identify with teenagers. When I was 3, we played with baby dolls, with little strollers, because you wanted to be like your mother," she says, "now the goal is a slutty teenager."

But to a toy industry expert like Chris Byrne, companies like MGA and Barbie are just playing the game intelligently, and the kids themselves don't see things the way adults do. "Girls don't see Bratz as trampy; they just see pretty, as it's personified by Paris Hilton or any of the MTV videos. There's been a redefining of what pretty is," he said.

 

E-mail Reyhan Harmanci at rharmanci(at)sfchronicle.com.

 

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)