I remember the moment that I made my baby a genius. I strapped her into the
bouncer, shoved it in front of the screen and pressed play on a DVD
featuring a slow-moving array of dangling household objects to a Mozart
soundtrack. The effect on her was dramatic, as dramatic as the
transformation of Jack Nicholson, post-lobotomy, in One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest. Gormless face, drooling (more than usual), she had
gone beyond “stimulated”, as the Baby Einstein
promotional literature promised, and towards “pre-operatively insensitive to
pain”.
“Look!” I said with maternal pride, “how intelligent
she already seems!”
What I had done was part of the 21st-century experiment that ended this week
with the news that the Walt Disney Company, which owns the Baby Einstein
brand, is offering refunds. The unusual move is for the millions of American
parents who bought Baby Einstein DVDs that did not make children into
geniuses. So far, the refund is not available to British parents.
The rise and fall of Baby Einstein precisely mirrors the work of
research into children’s brains — and what improves them. Baby
Einstein was conceived as a direct result of that research, becoming not
only a marketing phenomenon but also a defining part of a generation of
modern parenting. Disney is thought to make $200 million (£125 million) a
year in sales from its Baby Einstein division, controlling 90 per
cent of the baby media market. One study found that a third of all American
babies from six months to 2 years old had at least one Baby Einstein
video, and a Baby Einstein DVD currently tops Amazon’s UK Childcare &
Parenting section.
And now, ironically, it is research into child development that has come to
bite them on the tail. This story not only casts doubt over the role of TV
for infants, but also any middle-class attempt to hothouse. You want your
child to be a baby Einstein? Well, you got it — Einstein was famously
speech-delayed, not talking until well after 2 and not much of a whizz at
school.
It was in the early 1990s that neuroscientists started to realise what a
crucial period the first two years of life are for the human brain. Unlike
other organs, the brain is embryonic at birth; it forms itself in response
to what it finds on the outside. A completed will always remain adaptable,
but 80 per cent of the brain’s architecture is completed after 18 to 24
months. Two things help it grow: interacting with humans and, to a lesser
extent, things.
At about this point, hundreds of thousands of children were discovered
neglected in orphanages in Romania after the fall of the Ceaucescu regime.
Children placed in foster care before the age of 2 made remarkable
recoveries. Those who were given homes after the age of 2 had damaged IQs
and cognitive ability. Their neglect could be seen on a brain scan.
These findings were seized upon by the Western middle classes. If baby brains
were so malleable in the first two years of life that neglect could blight
them permanently, then the converse must be true. Ultra-stimulation could
make them ultra-brainy, and their anxious parents proud! So was born an
entire market of flashcards and baby sign language. Into this mix came
another piece of research: the Mozart effect. In 1993 a group of researchers
found that after listening to Mozart, spatial intelligence scores
temporarily increased.
This result has since been largely disproved — another study found the same
increase in IQ after listening to a passage of a Stephen King novel, and few
parents read King to their baby. But no matter, the two ideas were strongly
in the cultural ether when Julie Aigner-Clark, a former teacher and new
mother in Georgia, America, produced the first Baby Einstein video in
her basement. The title was a pastiche of parental ambition, the formula was
simple and low budget: dangling objects to a Mozart soundtrack. Spin-offs,
such as Baby Wordsworth, promised to “foster the development of your
toddler’s speech”.
It was an instant hit: the TV transformed from an electronic babysitter into
an electronic governess. For the first time the middle-classes could embrace
TV as enthusiastically as the working classes have — without the guilt. In
2002 in the UK the BBC launched Cbeebies, the channel devoted to educational
programming for very young children, and shows targeted at babies, such as Teletubbies
and In the Night Garden, flourished. Friends of mine referred to
“Einsteining” their babies when they wanted to take a shower, others talked
of Night Garden as “baby crack”.
Dr Jack Boyle, a leading child psychologist, says that TV had become
ubiquitous for toddlers. “If you take a sample of mothers whose kids are
two, 99 per cent of them will watch TV. Does it do them any harm? Probably
not. If you’re going to claim that a DVD increases a child’s IQ, you’re
barking mad. But if you’re going to claim that TV is bad for a child, you
need hard evidence.”
In Britain statistics are not available for babies, but in similar countries
such as Australia, the average four-month-old gazes at the box for 44
minutes every day. In the US, under 2s watch 1.2 hours a day on average.
But then the tide began to turn. In the 2004 Journal of Pediatrics, a
study from Seattle found that for every hour of television watched between
the ages of 1 and 3, the risk of attention problems at age 7 increases
nearly 10 per cent.
In August 2007 the same journal published a study showing that for children
aged between 8 and 16 months, exposure to baby DVDs delayed their speech
(for toddlers older than 17 months it did not have an effect). For each hour
a day spent watching baby DVDs, infants understood on average six to eight
fewer words than those who did not watch them.
In Freakonomics, the popular economics book of 2005, Steven Levitt, the
University of Chicago economist, cited research to show that television
watching had no effect on the educational attainment of children. In his
follow-up, SuperFreakonomics, published this month, he devotes a
whole chapter to trying to prove the link between television and crime. “For
every extra year a young person was exposed to TV in his first 15 years, we
see a 4 per cent increase in the number of property-crime arrests later in
life and a 2 per cent increase in violent-crime arrests,” he writes.
The American Academy of Paediatrics recommended that no child under the age of
2 has any screen time, and the Australian government this month announced
that it will issue guidelines advising parents to prevent under-2s from
watching TV.
It was in this context that a pressure group, Campaign for a Commercial Free
Childhood, threatened Disney with a class-action lawsuit for “unfair and
deceptive practices” over Baby Einstein, unless refunds were
offered.
Disney has now offered the refunds, but continues to defend the Baby
Einstein range, saying that its critics should not “twist and spin a
simple customer satisfaction action into a false admission of guilt”.
Dr Aric Sigman, psychologist and author of a new book The Spoilt Generation,
about the effect of TV and Baby Einstein on children, says that it
was “reprehensible” that the British Government did not offer the kind of
guidelines given in America and Australia on limiting TV for infants.
“An aspirational generation of middle-class parents were encouraged in the
belief that they could hothouse their child’s development,” he says. “We are
advised on every aspect of our lives, from vaccines to the fruit and
vegetables to eat, but the advice on TV for babies is conspicuous by its
absence. It’s a vote-loser, they know it’s an electronic babysitter,
very convenient for a lot of professional people too.”
So is that the closing credits for baby TV? Well, yes and no. The lesson of
the Romanian orphanages is that if you want to stimulate a baby before the
age of 2, you have to use a real human being to do it. None of the
hothousing flashcard programmes yet devised has improved on the basic
standards of an average loving home (similar to the one Einstein was raised
in).
And even the verdict on TV is extremely mixed. The harmful effects of putting
babies in front of baby TV was measured in hours a day — not a practice
favoured by the majority of responsible parents. Increasingly, researchers
realise that class is a major factor. The poorer the households, the more
television is watched. As such, it is extremely difficult for them to
separate the effects of deprivation from television.
Dr Martin Ward-Platt, a consultant paediatrician, defended the lack of
guidelines on TV and infants from the Royal College of Paediatrics. The
evidence, he says, was still too equivocal. “The farther you get away from
deprived populations, the less TV gets watched, and the more parental
controls there are, so it is hard to disentangle this stuff.
“Of course, the thing that really makes the difference for a baby is
interaction with a caregiver and there is nothing we can invent as a people
substitute. But if a child watches some TV and is exposed to people for the
rest of the time, they will do fine. What we don’t know is where the limit
is, where you start to hold children back.
“If there is no strong evidence either way, we think it’s much better to say
we don’t know, and what’s right for you is probably the best thing for your
family.”
Or, as a parent on the parenting website Mumsnet
says, on hearing the news of the Disney refund for Baby Einstein:
“Well, I bought some magic beans back in the spring and to be honest, I’m
disappointed with the results. Can I claim a refund?”
How the world views children watching TV
Australia
A study commissioned by the Australian government to tackle obesity
recommended this month that children under 2 should be banned from watching
TV and electronic media such as computer games. It also said those aged 2 to
5 should watch no more than one hour a day, as exposure to TV at an early
age could delay language development, affect concentration and lead to
obesity.
France
In August last year, France’s broadcasting authority banned the airing of TV
shows aimed at children under 3, after French psychologists found that that
TV undermines toddlers’ development, encourages restlessness and reduces
concentration. Also, 24-hour satellite channels targeting babies are now
banned from promoting the benefits of TV for the under-3s, and must issue a
warning before shows.
Sweden
All TV advertising aimed at children under the age of 12 has been banned in
Sweden since 1991, unless it is being shown so late that children would not
be watching. Health professionals have drawn links between this and the low
levels of obesity among Swedish children. Some satellite channels have
flouted the ban and broadcast from outside Sweden, prompting the Swedes to
campaign for a similar ban across the EU.
America
For ten years the official advice to parents from the American Academy of
Paediatrics has been that children under 2 should not see any electronic
media. In 2000, a law was passed that requires all television units to have
V-chip technology. This allows parents to block certain programmes based on
their ratings category. A password prevents children from changing the
settings.
China
In China, media regulators have banned TV content featuring crime or violence
during primetime viewing, in order to encourage a “healthy environment” for
children. Foreign programmes that promote Western ideology and politics have
also been prohibited, because they are considered to be a bad influence.
Britain
Advertising junk food during young children’s programmes was banned in Britain
in 2007; this was later extended to all those aimed at under-16s. But health
campaigners say children are still seeing the ads during adult shows and
have called for a total pre-9pm ban on junk food ads. Food manufacturers
have also been criticised for using digital media and text messages aimed at
young people.
Chloe Lambert
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