Baby Geniuses

With my first baby, my intentions were pure. There would be breastfeeding and co-sleeping and slings and enrichment and tummy time and reading aloud and no TV. She would be as smart as modern technology and parenting theory would allow.

This lasted about a week. The reality crushed the living crap out of my mothering fantasy. Even after I realised that I had given birth to an autonomous and passionate human being who hated the sling and the breast and the co-sleeping, I consoled myself with her love of Baby Einstein. At least in this small way, I was doing something to nourish her developing mind rather than simply feeding it the mental equivalent of junk food.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a parent with a kid under the age of twelve who isn’t familiar with Baby Einstein and its collection of “infant interactive” products. Best known are the videos, which have titles like “Baby Mozart” and feature some puppets, some bubbles, a classical music soundtrack and a large, disembodied hand that plays with toys. Other companies like Brainy Baby and So Smart offer similar products, but frequently play Jan to Baby Einstein’s Marcia.

In addition to the physical items, what this category of enrichment products is also selling is the idea that you can make your baby smarter. I am not the only parent to buy what they’re selling. According to Fortune, in 2005, this was a $2.5 billion market. The tiny grain of sand that has been polished into this multi-billion dollar pearl is “the Mozart effect,” a hypothesis that has been floating around for well over a decade.

In 1993, a study by two researches at U.C. Irvine reported that spatial-reasoning scores of undergrads increased after exposure to a Mozart piano concerto. Similar results sprang from studies on children who were given classical piano lessons. By the end of the ’90s, Georgia’s governor Zell Miller proposed that the state spend over $100,000 to make sure that each newborn received a classical music CD before leaving the hospital.

While the idea of building a better zero-to-three-year-old is nothing new — flashcards have been around for generations — the “Mozart effect” research kicked off a sea change in product design. Improving intelligence through technology takes low-tech flashcards into the new millennium. But the jury is still out on the educational value that these products have.

Most of the items marketed to parents with very small children are careful with their descriptive language. Baby Einstein, et. al., make no claims about improving test scores or making kids smarter in a measurable way, because such promises would force them to make their research and development process transparent. If you read the advertising copy, what is being promised is that you can make your baby “brighter” or “enhance your baby’s curiosity.” Such vagueness protects against lawsuits.

The newest comer in the field, however, has no such qualms. The LENA learning system consists of a LENA voice recorder, which you put in a pocket on your baby’s LENA clothing. At the end of the day, you download the information from the recorder onto your computer. The data is analysed by the company’s software, then you are given a report so that you know how many words your baby has heard during the course of the day.

According to a 1995 study done by Drs. Betty Hart and Todd Risley, there is a strong correlation between the number of words a child hears each day and that child’s IQ. A child who hears 8,600 words has an average IQ of 79; a child who hears 30,000 has an average of 117. LENA’s parent company, Infoture, has continued this research for the last five years while developing their system.

The LENA system gives a parent a way to track the number of words and, presumably, the child’s growth in IQ. This ability comes with a price. The starter system — recorder, software, user guide, charger, USB cables, stuffed toy and two articles of clothing — costs $780. Other items of clothing start at $32. In exchange, parents receive a way to create a visual representation of how many words their baby is exposed to in any given day.

Some parents appreciate the peace of mind that LENA offers, like Carrie Geving, who was a participant in LENA’s research. “As a parent, you want to be doing everything you can to give your child a head start, and this is definitely a great advantage to children of all ages,” she says. In her opinion, “The data are there, the proof is visible and children are benefiting from the program.”

No one denies the link between the language and IQ. According to Dr. Theresa Russo, associate professor of child and family studies at the State University of New York, Oneonta, “IQ is supposed to be more of an innate measurement and you don’t really measure it until school age. It’s about exposure to language, to reading, and to books over the course of their babyhood that develops potential IQ.” What is up for debate is whether or not a parent needs to spend $800 on a system to measure this exposure.

For Geving, whose LENA system was provided by Infoture as part of their research, it would be worth it. “If you were aware of how many words you were speaking to your child, you would realise how much more you could be giving them if you would just talk to them more,” she says.

By the time your infant is old enough for the LENA system, you may already be too late to make your baby brighter. There are products that claim to make your developing foetus smarter. The BabyPlus Prenatal Education System consists of a patented program of rhythmic sound lessons that are played to the growing child via a special speaker pouch that mom-to-be wears on her belly. Each lesson is an hour long and is to be played twice per day. It can be started anywhere from pregnancy weeks eighteen to thirty-two.

According to the promotional literature, “BabyPlus children have an intellectual, developmental, creative and emotional advantage from the time they are born.” Newborns who have been through the BabyPlus program will “more readily nurse, have an increased ability to self-soothe, are more interactive and responsive and are better relaxed and alert at birth.”

The BabyPlus idea has been around for twenty-five years and was originally fostered by Dr. Brent Logan through the Prenatal Institute in Seattle. Logan’s theory can be summed up briefly: the uterus is not a soundproof booth. Over the years, he developed an auditory system designed to stimulate the foetus’ brain. And once your baby has left the womb, your first opportunity to make him “brighter” has slammed shut.

The program has gained traction in the last decade largely through the work of BabyPlus’s president Lisa Jarrett, who holds degrees in both biology and psychology. Jarrett is also a satisfied customer who used the BabyPlus system with her four kids. Her acceptance wasn’t immediate. She played the tapes in order to appease her physician husband, who read about Logan’s work in a medical journal.

After her first baby, however, Jarrett knew “something positive developmentally was going on. It was more than just being smart,” she said. “This isn’t about creating a genius, any more than saying a prenatal vitamin is about making a body builder.

“The time to start thinking about brain development is prenatal to three. We’re not trying to push something unnatural, we’re just trying to strengthen what’s already there.”

Jarrett feels that BabyPlus is poised to become another complement to prenatal development like ingesting folic acid or not ingesting booze. “We’re very enthused here because we really think that our time has come. Not just caring for a child’s body, we’re also caring for her mind,” she says. “This is about long-term learning skills — and our country is very interested in our child’s long-term learning nowadays.”

Compared to the LENA system, BabyPlus is a bargain at $149 for the basic package. Jarrett’s company also donates a fair number of them to parents who could benefit but lack the financial resources. In terms of building a better baby, $149 can be promoted as a small price to pay. And what parent, so the sales pitch goes, doesn’t want to strengthen her baby’s brain?

Baby Einstein could be considered the gateway drug into the world of smart babies. The videos are relatively inexpensive. Most wind up in a new mom’s hands during a baby shower or passed along by more experienced moms at a playdate. My first hit — Baby Mozart — was picked up during a desperate late-night trip to Target to stock up on maxi pads, cranberry juice and anything I could find to distract my grouchy infant. I picked Baby Mozart simply because it seemed better somehow than an episode of Teletubbies. I am not alone in this belief.

“I never felt pressure to make her smarter,” says Kimberly Wassmuth, whose oldest daughter is now three. “In the beginning, I just wanted to take a shower and the DVDs kept her happy.”

There have been visible benefits, according to Wassmuth. “As she got older, it became clear she was learning from the videos. It was nice because some of it I did not know how to teach her or that she needed to learn it. I think one thing it showed was that she loves music – the songs on the videos are her favorite part! When I watched the videos with her, and we talked about what we were watching, it was interesting to see what she picked up by watching and then when she learned more by talking about it with me,” she says.

Not all parents are as enchanted by Baby Einstein and his pals, nor is the American Academy of Pediatrics. Their recommendation is that kids under the age of two have no TV whatsoever, no matter what how educational the content claims to be. While the Baby Einstein company (now part of Disney) makes note of the AAP’s recommendation, they also make it clear that their products are to be used as a “video board book” that parent and child should experience together.

Some moms still aren’t sold, however.

“I have tended in my life to be an overachiever, but over the last few years I have been trying to take a more Zen-like approach,” says Karen Heidrick vanWisse, whose daughter is ten months old. “I want my child to enjoy her childhood and not be stressed about accomplishing this or that milestone. I firmly believe that children birth to three years do not need more flashcards, they need more love and security and attention. I sometimes sound Pollyannaish, but I really do think love is the answer, even to questions of intelligence — it is the foundation of everything — when we feel secure, we think better and learn better.”

Russo agrees. “If we’re saying that this product can increase your IQ by this many points, it’s outcome-oriented,” she says. “I directed a preschool and I had parents come in and say, ‘I send them here to learn, not to play. My daughter says this is a house and it doesn’t look like a house. You need to teach her how to draw a house.’ And I’d say, ‘If she says it’s a house, it’s a house.’”

Essentially, Baby Einstein, BabyPlus and the LENA system are building their bottom line by preying on parents’ well-intentioned desire to do all that they can to ensure their kid’s future success. But no matter what we do to improve the odds — including everything from genetic modification to classical music CDs — the reality is that it is almost entirely out of our control. Which isn’t to say that you should completely ignore your baby — but a parent who is engaged enough to buy a smarter baby product is probably already giving their child the attention he or she needs.

Thirty seconds of conversation with my eloquent now-five-year-old daughter proves that neither the Baby Einstein videos nor her repeated viewings of The Little Mermaid and Shrek have done her intellect any harm. The houses she draws look still nothing like houses, but I don’t care, so long as the stick figures inside them are smiling.