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Kristy Milland devotes up to three hours a day to trading stone elephant statues, bagging groceries, answering skill-testing questions and gardening online from her suburban Toronto apartment.

It's all in a day's work for the stay-at-home mother who cares for 129 virtual pets known as Webkinz. Her job includes playing online games to earn virtual dollars to buy food and other pet necessities - and luxuries, such as pet beds.

"I have never gotten into online games, but this just caught me and trapped me," said Ms. Milland, 28, who cares for her nine-year-old daughter and three neighbourhood boys. "I'm addicted for life, I have a feeling."

Caring for a neglected family pet that children begged to have (and promised, promised, promised to rear) has long fallen to parents.

But Ms. Milland reflects the face of an emerging subculture of parents who find themselves compelled to tend to the wildly popular stuffed animals with online lives whenever their kids have lost interest or cannot get to a computer.

That means logging on to the website for Webkinz and conducting any number of daily activities to feed and enhance the virtual lives of alley cats, puppies, lions and zebras. Chores range from answering "quizzies" to getting a job that pays in Kinzcash, which can be used to improve pets' online homes in Webkinz World.

In the process, many parents become hooked on the games themselves. Ms. Milland estimates she has spent more than $2,000 on Webkinz, which sell for about $15 apiece, since her daughter got her first doll a year ago.

"I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard of," Ms. Milland said. "Then she started going online and building a room [for the pet] and decorating the rooms. Then I started building the house larger. The deeper I got, the more fun it was for me to find all these little things to do and play the games."

The Webkinz phenomenon is a cross between the public's once-insatiable appetite for Beanie Babies and children's fascination with Tamagotchi, a digital pet on a keychain equipped with buttons for feeding and cleanup.

Millions of Webkinz have been sold, and officials at the Toronto-based manufacturer, Ganz, say activity on the Webkinz World website suggests children are not the only ones logging on.

"Either there are a lot of kids walking around with bags under their eyes or it's their parents who are logging on," Ganz spokeswoman Susan McVeigh said.

"We're getting hits right through midnight and 1 in the morning. A lot of parents are online after their kids go to bed, earning extra Kinzcash."

WebkinzInsider.com, an independently run online forum for pet owners, gets roughly 500,000 visitors a day and is loaded with parents enthusiastically swapping stories.

"Most people buy them for their children and, just like any other pet, the parents end up taking care of them," said Justin Watkins, 30, who oversees the site. "The kid gets the Kinzcash and they buy fun things to play with and forget to feed the pets. So parents feed them and say, 'Wow, this is kind of fun.' "

Canadian parenting guru Kathy Buckworth, author of Journey to the Dark Side: Supermom Goes Home, said that while there is nothing wrong with parents indulging their inner child on occasion, those who assume their children's responsibilities run the risk of cheating their children of life lessons in success and failure.

"The message they're sending to their kids is, 'If I drop the ball, Mom will be right behind me picking it up,' " Ms. Buckworth said. "Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad thing to let a Webkinz die, without sounding too mercenary."

For the record, Webkinz cannot die. They become ill when they are underfed, and grow green snouts and sport ice packs on their heads.

Ms. Milland's daughter Sephie hasn't fed the 45 critters in her account in more than a month. "I make sure they're okay," her mother said. "She's more interested in playing the games. When she plays with them they starve, they're miserable and they get sick."

Karren Ritchie, 36, a hairdresser in Oliver, B.C. - who has 13 Webkinz of her own and helps maintain her eight-year-old daughter's account of 15 when she is in school or does not have Internet access - said joining her daughter online has brought them closer.

But she draws the line at feeding her daughter's pets. "I log on to her account to help her get the treasures and exclusive offers that she can't get when she's not on the computer because I don't think it's fair that she be penalized," said Ms. Ritchie. "I would never step in and feed her pets for her. Now her hamster is a totally different story. It's a real hamster."