All mouth and mini skirts

Barbie is flagging but is the next big thing any better, asks Clare Longrigg

Many mothers of young daughters will have been unable to repress a smile at the news that Barbie is not quite as popular as she used to be. The pink princess, often to be seen in a lopsided tiara, driving an open-top sports car with her arms straight up in the air, is suffering something of a career plateau. Sales were down 18% in the last quarter, a decline that marketing stunts like her much-publicised split from boyfriend Ken have failed to arrest. Is it possible that the tyranny of that tiny waist, those improbably small feet always on tippy toes, and that shiny blonde wig, may be at an end?

And if so, what is to replace her? A realistic operating theatre for aspiring vets? A construction kit? No. The upstart threatening Barbie's supremacy in the toy box is the Bratz doll: a reportedly younger, more street-smart young lady who wears itsy-bitsy clothes and an outsize pout. The Bratz doll, according to her marketing people, is into clubbing rather than horse riding, and shows more of her midriff than her parents might like. Compared to Barbie's fairy princess get-ups and carriages, Bratz dolls are embarrassingly trendy.

My daughter, aged two, was given one of these Bratz for Christmas, and tore into the box with irrepressible excitement. It came with such tiny garments that changing its clothes involved some undignified struggling (in this, at least, the doll may accurately presage teenage agonies). It had a make-up kit full of items so small that, within seconds, lipsticks, eye shadows, earrings and sunglasses had disappeared into the cracks between the floorboards.

Undoubtedly the best thing about Bratz is the fact that, to change her shoes, you have to change the doll's feet. In odd corners of the house I occasionally come across a tiny surgical looking prosthetic with platform shoe ready attached. I wonder whether this will instill amputation anxiety in my tender child. She may never look at a pair of Manolo's without shuddering.

If sales of Bratz are closing the gap between Barbie and the rest of toydom, does this mean we will never be rid of anatomically bizarre dolls with pert breasts and huge mouths? What is it about these jailbait creatures that our daughters love so much?

Bratz distributors make the astonishing claim that Bratz "connect emotionally with today's girls in a way that Barbie cannot". This is hard to believe - I prefer to think that Bratz inspire empathy in children in the same way as the green-haired troll or the pipe-cleaner spider: as part of the storyline of the moment.

Barbie's people, meanwhile, make the jaw-dropping assertion that their doll has a million accessories to replace parental interaction in today's motherless childhood. (It's not for nothing that Barbie's jaw doesn't drop, nor - thanks, perhaps, to some form of prototype botox - do her eyebrows rise. With PR claims like these, it's better that she can make no visible expression of surprise.) "Society has changed so parents don't have as much time to play with their children and the classic interaction is not happening as much," a spokeswoman said recently. "What children are looking to us for is content to give them a storyline to put the dolls in the right context." Is this the message we want to offer girls growing up - that a decent pair of shades can replace human relationships?

I confess to being baffled by the argument that dolls such as Barbie, while offering a harmful stereotype to little girls, encourage sensitivity and nurturing tendencies in boys. When children are small, role play can take whacky turns: sometimes I am expected to be mother to my mewling babies, at others, we are all given our medicine, by Brandi the Bratz doll.

Whatever we think of little girls being instructed in obsession with style from an early age by dolls with silly names and increasingly elaborate accoutrements, the age group enjoying them is getting younger and shows no signs of abandoning them in favour of the Lego box.

My theory is that Bratz will never be as popular among three to five-year-olds as Barbie, because Barbie makes a better weapon. Her ankles are sufficiently slender to be grasped by a tiny hand, and her legs long enough to get good leverage. Brandi Bratz, with her big head and little legs, doesn't wallop half so well.