Q: What exactly is the “baby genius” phenomenon, and
how did it take hold?
A: The baby genius phenomenon—the idea that babies need certain
types of stimulation from toys and videos for proper brain growth—really
took hold in the mid-1990s. In 1997, Bill and Hillary Clinton and
Rob Reiner hosted a White House conference on the importance of
the first three years of life. They were trying to show that standards-based,
state-backed care for infants and toddlers is critical because
the brain develops more prodigiously in the first three years of
life than it ever does afterward. The entire foundation of life—language,
math, emotional well-being—is established between zero and
three. All the newsweeklies did major stories on it.
What the brain conference presenters were emphasizing—and
indeed, what the field of early childhood development emphasizes—is
that the kind of stimulation babies and toddlers need is the kind
that comes naturally to people when they have enough downtime to
enjoy being with their young children. You smile at your baby,
she smiles back; she coos to you, you coo back. You read and sing
and make up games together. It’s fun!
But that was not the lasting legacy of the conference. The main
message of the conference was: “If I don’t stimulate
my baby in the right way before she turns three, the door to learning
will close forever.” That message generated tremendous fear
among first-time parents, and where there is fear, there is market
opportunity. Many in the toy and entertainment industries, and
many entrepreneurs, began selling the idea that with the right “stimulation” from
a toy, a video, or some other “learning” product, one’s
infant or toddler can be made smarter. This zeitgeist was entirely
the product of marketing, not legitimate research.
Q: Could one conference spawn a whole marketing phenomenon?
A: There was also a lot of press that same year on what was called “the
Mozart Effect.” It was based on an experiment at the University
of California that was thoroughly debunked later on, and had never
been tested on babies or toddlers. But somehow, the two ideas,
that zero-to-three-year-olds needed special stimulation to be smart
and that Mozart could make you a math whiz, spread like a flu virus
and then kind of converged. Within weeks the Baby Einstein Company
was born. It was founded by a stay-at-home mother named Julie Aigner-Clark,
who said that she just wanted to create what she called a “video
picture book” for her own baby, and her first product was
Baby Mozart. She was careful to say that her videos were not genius-makers,
but rather supported infants’ natural curiosity. Aigner-Clark
had a great marketing plan. But she had never done any research
on how infants or toddlers process videos.
Q: Do little kids process TV or videos all that differently from
adults?
A: Yes—radically differently. If you looked at a brain scan
of an adult watching television, you would see up to seventeen
different areas of the brain being activated. The brains of babies
and toddlers have not even developed the synapses to join those
areas. This means that watching television is a pretty jarring
experience for very little children.
To adults, a show like Sesame Street may not seem to cut quickly
from camera shot to camera shot compared to MTV. But adults have
many years of TV-watching, as well as life experience, under their
belts. A change of camera perspective—or cut—does not
seem jarring to us because our brains have, over years of watching
TV and movies, learned to fill in the blanks when the point of
view on the screen shifts from one object, person or scene to another.
But until children reach the age of four or so, their minds are
simply unable to make the mental jump with the cuts.
Q: So what are babies and toddlers getting out of watching these
videos and shows?
A: Researchers say that to babies, it is all noise. Toddlers, however,
grasp a little more. What they learn definitively is how to recognize
characters. And to very young children, as one market researcher
said, the character is not just a cute face—it is a brand.
Q: Characters are brands. What does that mean?
Well, the only real thing toddlers learn from even so-called educational
programs is character recognition. Then they see those characters
everywhere on licensed products, where they take on the role
of brand identifiers. To a toddler, Elmo or Disney’s Cinderella
is like the Nike swoosh or the Coach logo to adults. Any positive
message young children might receive from characters such as
Elmo, Dora, or Clifford is diminished by this multimedia branding.
These characters are always trying to sell children something.
Q: How can parents protect their kids from this kind of consumerism?
A: Well it’s not just a personal problem; it’s a cultural
and political issue. Again, fear creates market opportunities,
and American families with very young children live with a lot
of fear. If you work outside the home, you worry about whether
your young children are being cared for kindly and competently
by the people you pay so you can go to work. If you stay at home
to raise your children, you forego Social Security earnings and
health insurance and you decrease the likelihood of later finding
employment at the level you were accustomed to. Either way, the
vast majority of us are stressed out and strapped for cash. Families
simply need more time to do “nothing.” The only activity
that helps children learn is interacting with caregivers who love
them—an activity that is basically not supported by American
culture or its economy.
The only way to earn the right to simply hang out with and enjoy
our little children seems to be to fight for it. To earn it will
involve lobbying for paid family leave; flexible work hours; universal,
standards-based child care; universal health care for all children;
and fair wages for all working families, especially single mothers.
It seems like the perfect cause for all parents.
