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Resisting Pressure to Create Brainier Babies by Wenda Reed

A newborn baby has:

• 100 billion neurons or brain cells — roughly as many as the number of stars in the Milky Way
• Trillions of connections to be made between the neurons
• A limited “window of opportunity” to make those connections.

No wonder parents feel intense pressure to do everything “right.”

The brain does not keep creating neurons, but it triples in size in the first two years of life. Each neuron becomes bigger and heavier as it adds extensions to send messages into and out of the cell. Trillions of connections or synapses are formed between the brain cells, creating complicated neural pathways.

In our competitive American society, the desire to take full advantage of the early learning years has fostered what Seattle researcher Dr. Dimitri Christakis calls “The Build-a-Brainier-Baby Industry,” and what Alissa Quart, author of Hothouse Kids, calls the “Baby Genius Edutainment Complex.” They are referring to DVDs, CDs, flash cards and electronic educational toys designed to stimulate the baby’s brain.

“The complex is the first stage of the American passion for raising gifted children,” Quart writes, “reflecting the faith that, exposed to enough media, typically in tandem with equally stirring classes, bright children can be invented, and that precocity is the best insurance policy for one’s children.”

The relentless marketing of The Brainy Baby Left and Right Brain, Baby Prodigy and Baby Einstein videos — named, in Quart’s words “after a crew of infantilized dead white male geniuses” — creates a pressure in parents to make sure their babies and toddlers are not missing out on essential stimulation. The marketing and the competition create a “nexus of anxiety and aspiration,” Quart says. Into that nexus “the new brainy-baby products have flooded, promising scientifically demonstrated mind-enrichment for your children.”

“There’s a social dependency,” agrees Christakis, associate professor of pediatrics and co-director of the Child Health Institute at the University of Washington. “Ten years ago there were no products like these; now parents are getting them in baby showers. It feeds on itself. Parents are thinking, ‘All my friends are using them.’”

As one young mother said to me at a recent event, “I want to do everything I can for my baby. What if I screw it up?”

THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES

Quart points out that the research underpinning the baby edutainment complex is often shaky and built on false premises. A prime example is the “Mozart effect,” based on a study done by Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher in 1993. One group of college students listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata, while another group didn’t. Then both groups took a paper-folding-and-cutting test. Those who had listened to the music performed better than those who had not. The music seemed to improve the students’ short-term spatial thinking. A second study in 1995 yielded similar findings.

`There are two problems with the Mozart effect. One is that no psychologists or musicologists have been able to duplicate the findings. The other is that there is no evidence that it extends to babies and toddlers. Despite the theory’s debunking, classical music is touted as an educational component of many of the videos and CDs. “Music is wonderful,” Christakis says, “but I don’t know that it helps them learn.”

A leading premise in the marketing of educational videos and toys is that if we don’t provide our children with all of the right learning opportunities by age 3 or 5, it’s too late. While experts agree that the early learning years are very important, newer theories of “plasticity” postulate that the brain continues to develop and grow throughout life. “It’s important to point out that the windows of development do not slam shut, as the earliest versions of the Parents’ Action for Children and the Birth-to-Three movement suggested,” says Bradley Schlaggar, a pediatric neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis, one of many researchers cited in Hothouse Kids.

Another premise rests on the fact that orphaned infants deprived of stimulation and interaction in Russia and Romania fail to learn and thrive. Therefore, more stimulation and enrichment will make babies smarter.

That’s not necessarily true — especially if it’s the wrong type of stimulation.

“Babies can’t get the content of what’s on a screen,” Christakis explains. “They learn much better from a live person than from a video — even if it’s the same person in real life and on the screen.” He adds that “the pacing of TV and videos is supernatural. It’s overstimulating. It causes the brain to be wired for high-impulse, rapidly changing images.”

While he cites the benefit of limited quality television for children older than 2, he is a strong proponent of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation that, ideally, children under 2 should have no screen time at all.

In 2004, Christakis published research showing that the more TV children watch as toddlers, the more problems with attention they have later in life. He and his fellow researchers asked parents how many hours of TV their children watched at age 1 and at age 3. When their children were 7, they were asked a series of questions about how well their children were able to pay attention and focus. The results were startling: For each additional hour of daily TV viewing before age 3, a child’s chances of later developing problems paying attention increased by 10 percent.

Last fall Christakis incurred the wrath of The Walt Disney Company, makers of Baby Einstein videos, for releasing a study showing that babies and toddlers who view videos have lower language skills than those who don’t. He and his colleagues interviewed the parents of 1,008 babies ages 2 to 24 months, asking them about the amount of time their children spent watching TV, DVDs or videos, and having them complete a short form of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Christakis found that among infants ages 8 to 16 months, each hour per day of viewing baby DVDs and videos was associated with a 16.99 point decrease in the language assessment score. However, no drop was found for toddlers ages 17 to 24 months.

Patricia Kuhl, Ph.D., professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, has repeatedly shown that babies learn language by mimicking parents and caregivers. Recent research focused on infants’ ability to learn second languages in the first year of life. A native Mandarin speaker played with and spoke with children, in person, for 12 sessions of 25 minutes over a four-week period. Later, the babies recognized Mandarin sounds. Kuhl had another set of babies watch a Chinese speaker play with babies on a video and another group listen to audio recordings of the Chinese woman playing; a fourth group had no exposure to the language. None of the babies in the last three groups could recognize any Mandarin sounds.

“The marketing (of baby educational videos and CDs) has led parents to believe they will make kids smarter,” Christakis says. “We’ve shown that they do not do this.”

WHERE’S THE HARM?

Even if baby edutainment doesn’t help your child learn, isn’t it harmless?

In small doses: Yes. If used consistently: No.

The biggest problem with using videos, CDs and preprogrammed electronic toys to stimulate your baby is that it keeps her away from essential learning and interaction, and it emphasizes the wrong things.

“Babies under 2 are now watching TV one to two hours a day — that’s 10 to 20 percent of the time they’re awake,” Christakis points out. “What are they not doing while they’re watching?”

They’re not involved with one-on-one interaction with parents and caregivers, he answers. “The best thing for babies’ learning is anything that brings children and parents together. Most video products take them apart. Making them smarter by spending less time with them is counterintuitive.”

Terry Meersman, executive director of the Seattle-based nonprofit Talaris Research Institute, agrees, believing that we push academics too soon. As a charter member of the new statewide nonprofit organization, Thrive by Five, Talaris will be the communicator of the latest research on early learning.

“Early learning should refer to the parent-child attachment, emotional development and teaching the child self-regulation,” he says. Building on the research of Dr. John Gottman at the Gottman Institute in Seattle, Meersman says that emotional intelligence and social skills are the most important parts of a child’s early foundation.

“We cannot accelerate development,” he adds. “The relationship (between the child and parent or caregiver) will be the biggest indicator of a child’s success. It’s a lost opportunity if we are sacrificing that relationship by doing something else.”

“Children learn best by interactions with their parents,” summarizes Danielle Kassow, Ph.D., a Talaris research associate and educational psychologist. “We don’t give formulas for what to do because it depends on the culture, the temperament of the child and a lot of other factors. Basically, spend time with your child: talk, read, play, sing and cuddle every day. Kids should be playing. They should be using multiple senses.”

A problem with learning from a screen or an electronically programmed toy is that the instruction is initiated by a machine. “Learning should be directed by the parent and by the child,” Kassow says. “One of the things we talk about (at Talaris) is tuning into the child’s interest, following cues such as a head turned toward or away, arched back, eye gaze, pointing.”

In her book Unplugged Play, author and radio host Bobbi Conner quotes dozens of parenting experts, from Penelope Leach and Dr. T. Berry Brazelton to Jane Healy and Edward Hallowell, on the importance of unstructured, child-directed play and exploration. She advises delaying introducing infants, toddlers and preschoolers to high-tech toys, computers and electronic games and introducing them to the habit of having fun without plug-ins.

Downtime and even boredom are important to young children because they foster creativity and help a child learn how to entertain himself, Conner concludes.

Indeed “adults’ fear of children’s boredom” helps fuel the “Baby Genius Edutainment Complex” in Quart’s view. It’s part of the growing idea that kids have to be “doing something productive at all times,” she says.

She quotes Adam Phillips, author of On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Harvard University Press, 1998): “It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that a child should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him.”

The overstimulated child, in effect, has no leisure to explore what interests him, no time to be creative, no time to imagine or play-act. “DVDs, when playing on a screen, are by definition untouchable and mechanical. They encourage infants and toddlers to think while watching images on a box, rather than to invent and imagine a story around an object like a toy bear,” Quart comments.

Fancifully, Quart quotes philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin: “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.”

“Indeed a number of childhood edutainment products are equivalent to a mechanical rustling in the leaves, a buzzing, bleeping thing called computerized enrichment that drives away the dream bird that could otherwise have hatched the egg of true human experience,” she writes.

We parents — not anything manufactured, mechanized or preprogrammed — can introduce our children to human experiences, and this big, beautiful world can foster their desire to keep exploring it on their own. The time we spend laughing and cooing with them, talking and singing with them, cuddling and loving and reading and playing silly games with them is not time wasted, but time invested in true early learning.

Wenda Reed is a regular columnist for Seattle Woman and managing editor for Seattle’s Child magazine. She has been writing about early learning for the past 12 years.

©2008 Caliope Publishing Company