Experts worry about the dangers of such an early indoctrination into consumerism without any accompanying message about values. "No one ad is so bad. But the combination of 400 ads a day creates in children a combination of narcissism, entitlement, and dissatisfaction," says clinical psychologist Mary Pipher, author of The Shelter of Each Other, a book about family life.
But there is also a subtler worry about the nature of the toys. Last year 38 per cent of all money spent on toys went to licensed toys, meaning toys that had some tie-in to television or movie characters. Think of Batman, Hercules, Star Wars, Jurassic Park. Where is the role of imagination in all this?
If a toy comes from TV, a child tends to follow the storyline, Yale University psychologist Dorothy Singer told Businessweek. There is simply less room for creativity, for the essential idea of play and creativity that Winnicott felt was so important.
And that bring us back to Jill Barad and Barbie. Or as some would put it: the Jill Barad who actually is Barbie.
Jill Barad is a member of perhaps the most exclusive club in the world; she is the chief executive officer of one of the world's largest corporations, a rung she shares with only a handful of other women in the US.
Barad, a 47-year-old energetic dynamo who favours high, high heels and Chanel suits, runs Mattel Inc, the world's largest toy company, a $4.8 billion (£3.7 billion), 25,000 employee-strong powerhouse, from her office complex near the beach in Los Angeles, California.
Growing up in New York, Barad wanted to be an actress, but abandoned that idea and got a job selling cosmetics. After moving to Los Angeles she took a job at Mattel in 1981 as a product manager for Barbie, the iconic doll that millions of girls had grown up with since its introduction in 1959.
Who changed who is debatable. "At Mattel I worked on a brand that changed my life and her name was Barbie," Barad told a Girls' Club convention last year in New York. "When Barbie is in a little girl's hands, she is a vehicle for dreaming, for imagining what girls can be. My mother gave me a bumblebee when I started work. She said that aerodynamically, bees shouldn't be able to fly. But they do. Remember that. I can say that for you girls, anything is possible." As is typical in response to Jill Barad speeches, the room exploded in applause.
Barad also changed Barbie's life. From a moribund doll that had £154 million in international sales in 1982, Barad developed the idea of "play patterns" for Barbie. There would be Dating Barbie, Shopping Barbie, Going to the Beach Barbie. By 1985, Barad would introduce Day to Night Barbie: by day, Barbie was a stylish business executive; by night she was a party girl. Girls would dream and imagine and invent stories.
By 1998, Barbie was a £1.5 billion brand that had helped bring Mattel back from the brink of bankruptcy in the mid-1980s. By some estimates, Barbie contributes 38 per cent of all Mattel's sales, and a stunning 55 per cent of its operating profits. The average American girl owns nine Barbie dolls.
And therein may lie the problem and the current crisis that is threatening Mattel. Barbie is not a fad toy. The last two make-or-break Christmas seasons have seen the toy market overtaken by others. And this year, the Pokemon phenomenom - a series of 150 bug-like monsters based on a Japanese game that now includes a TV series, a hit movie, a Nintendo game, trading cards and just about any other tie-in you can imagine - is promising to again eclipse Mattel and Barbie.
The phenomenon could not come at a worse time for Barad. Mattel's stock price has lost 70 per cent of its value in the last 20 months, shaving $13.5 billion (£10 billion) off the value of the company since March, 1998. Valued at $45 a share that month, Mattel is now a paltry $13 a share. More than a dozen shareholders have filed lawsuits since September, demanding to know why the company's value is plummeting.
The critics are ridiculing Barad, calling for her head. Where is the magic, the golden imaginative touch that built Mattel? They accuse Barad of relying too heavily on Barbie, of failing to come up with an idea like Pokemon or Furby, a toy that will sell, albeit for a single season.
Instead of battling back as usual, Barad appears to be retreating, last week cancelling an appearance at an important toy conference in New York.
It may be that there is simply no way to respond to critics, because it may be that in a world of video games and television scripted monsters, Barbie's day is over. Perhaps the time of a teddy, or a blanket, or a Barbie has been irretrievably erased by marketers. It is Wall Street and shareholders who will determine the future of Mattel. Indeed they will decide the future of Barad. Stock price will rule, and it will have little to do with fantasy and imagination. But one wonders what Donald Winnicott would say.