Oh, you beautiful doll!

It’s a rite of passage for all parents, and the one we dread the most: when your child is old enough to articulate which part of the toy store he or she wants to charge to your credit card.

If you have a girl, like Scott and I do, chances are that one of the biggest decisions you’ll have to make – along with what "big" school to send her to – will be what first doll to get her.

That decision was easy in my day. In the ’70s, the only fashion doll available on the market was Barbie (whose deadly curves burdened me with a lifetime of body issues, by the way). My mother was luckier. Born during the Japanese Occupation, she didn’t have any dolls till nearly puberty, and even then, the doll she had to share with her four sisters was a generic plastic affair that her father brought home from the States. It didn’t even have a name.

Which leads me to wonder, what is with Americans and their dolls? Dolls are popular the world over, of course, but no country turns a doll into a phenomenon like Americans do. In 1959 Barbie was born, and she ruled girl’s hearts until her all-American appeal was challenged by a different sort of cuteness in the ’80s when Cabbage Patch came along. Even with their strange, hairless heads and unlikely back story of birth in a cabbage patch, these dolls were so beloved my youngest sister mourned as if someone had died when her Cabbage Patch baby got lost.

By then I was a teenager and above such things, so it was only with peripheral vision that I glimpsed doll phenomena come and go, like Beanie Babies (those scrawny stuffed animals whose new collections were greeted like the Second Coming), to the more recent Build-A-Bear (you stuff your own bear and customize it with its own birth certificate and wardrobe). Now comes the most excessive (or educational, depending on your point of view) phenomenon yet, American Girl.

Born in the Midwest during the height of the Cabbage Patch craze, American Girl is one of the few stores where the dolls have pets… and the pets have their own accessories. Barbie’s still around, of course, but in these PC times, that just leads to a Pandora’s box of self-image questions. You have Bratz, but most moms find the diva makeup and tarty clothes about as appealing as Paris Hilton.

Which is why American Girl is so enticing. These dolls are as wholesome as apple pie, and just as good for you. Each doll doesn’t have a mere name and full wardrobe – she has a heritage. Whole series of books are written about her adventures. One of the most popular American Girl dolls is Felicity, a colonial girl growing up in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1774. Kirsten, a pioneer girl growing up on the American frontier in 1854, comes with her own horse-drawn wagon and log cabin, no doubt. Not to be left out of the diverse American landscape are Josefina, a Hispanic girl growing up on a ranch in New Mexico in 1824, and Addy, a "courageous" African-American girl growing up in war-torn Civil War America in 1864.

My three-year-old daughter Isobel, who of course was too young and Filipino to relate to all the bonnets, pinafores and pioneering spirit, gravitated towards the "American Girl of Today" section in Manhattan’s American Girl Place, one of only three outlets in the United States (the other two are in Chicago and Los Angeles). Located on ritzy Fifth Avenue, American Girl Place can turn even the most emancipated, liberal-thinking mom into a drooling resident of Stepford. At AGP, little girls between 3 and 13 are encouraged to look like their doll, dress like their doll, give their doll a life more fabulous than their own. At a section of the store called "Just Like You," the dolls come in a staggering variety of hair, eye, and skin colors, just ripe for the picking by some lookalike owner. A basic, 18-inch doll with vinyl head and predominantly cloth body costs about as much as a ticket to a Broadway show. Then there are the extras. Like, if you want the doll to come with a little dog on a leash, that’ll cost you a cool C-note.

Oddly, despite its "rainbow coalition" appeal, we didn’t notice any Asian dolls in the store. This may have something to do with there being no (or very few) Asians wandering around AGP. Does this mean Asian kids are not crazy about dolls? Or just not looking for dolls that look like them?

Far from trembling in their loafers at the cost, the mothers I saw at AGP were even more into it than their daughters, cooing over the Bitty Babies on the top floor with their fully loaded strollers, high chairs, and cribs. Their daughters, meanwhile, typically clad in the same colorful outfits as the dolls they were clutching, pulled at their mom’s skirts to go to another, even more wondrous part of the store. There was the Doll Hair Salon, where a whole row of stylists tended to dolls sitting in barber chairs. For $10, a doll can get a regular ’do, or more labor-intensive, ghetto-fabulous braids for $20. For $14.95, you can get your picture taken with your doll and appear on the cover of American Girl magazine, a monthly chock full of stories, activities, and good values for little girls. Injured dolls are admitted in wheelchairs to the Doll Hospital, where every bald patch is treated with the same gravity as an outpatient procedure. I couldn’t really tell – the "operating room" was hidden from view behind the admitting area.

On the top floor is the destination of choice for tweens everywhere: American Girl Café, where you can eat with your doll on those oh-so-refined trays normally reserved for high tea. Despite the lunch’s fixed price of $22 (which I suppose is a bargain for Fifth Avenue), the place was packed with enough estrogen to cure all the menopausal women in Manhattan.

And where are the poor fathers in all of this? Out shopping at Brooks Brothers, or Virgin Megastore, as Scott was. He came just in time to escort us out of AGP, and we were both such proud parents. Isobel, our non-material girl, had played with gusto with the Bitty Babies, but seemed overwhelmed by the abundance around her and hadn’t asked for a thing.

But right before we reached the revolving doors, her sweet voice rang out, freezing the blood in our veins: "Mommy, where is the doll that looks like me?"

Credit card holstered and at the ready, we reluctantly summoned a saleslady, who cleverly picked out Isobel’s doppelganger in about a minute flat. The resemblance was uncanny: same brown hair, hazel-brown eyes, and skin tone somewhere between Scott’s au lait and my crème brulee. Isobel christened her Emily, a variation on her second name, Amelie, and stared at her in wordless rapture for a full five minutes after we got home.

If Barbie gave me body-image issues, I can’t imagine what effect a lookalike doll will have on Isobel. Hopefully we won’t have to hear about it from a therapist in 10 years’ time. Next to paying off our credit-card debt, that won’t be child’s play.