a baby yuppie ready to embark on a course of bourgeois self-improvement and achievement — not when she graduated from Harvard but right now. The 1980s saw the marketing of infant flash cards, designed to drill little geniuses on their ABC’s and 1-2-3’s. Yuppie mothers had step aerobics classes; yuppie babies had Gymboree classes.
PRENATAL UNIVERSITY
Some of the most bizarre innovations in baby products emerged from 1980s academic research focusing on the origins of literacy. The established assumption had been that children are ready to start learning to read when they first receive formal instruction at about age six, usually from their first-grade teacher. That timetable made it almost impossible for teachers to diagnose and attend to reading-related learning disabilities at an early enough age. Because children were assumed to be blank reading slates before school age, teachers had no context to draw on when a child showed signs of reading difficulties in school. Did the trouble stem from developmental issues, or were there cultural barriers that could be addressed? In looking for answers to that question, academics discovered that reading skills began far earlier than first grade; in fact, the foundations of literacy clearly began in infancy. The research revealed that children who were “bathed” in language from the start — spoken to, read to, encouraged to tell their own stories and share their thoughts — were far more likely to be able to read by school age than those who weren’t. In short order, academic terms such as “pre-reading skills,” “emergent literacy,” and “prerequisites to reading” were introduced into the popular lexicon via newsweeklies and parenting magazines devoted to keeping anxious Boomers abreast of the latest baby research.
An outfit based in Hayward, California, that called itself Prenatal University was among the first to capitalize on the burgeoning compulsion to raise literate children. Founded in 1979 by an obstetrician-gynecologist named F. Rene Van de Carr, the course taught expectant parents how to channel a fetus’s attention, help her build a useful vocabulary, and learn lullabies. In the fifth month of pregnancy, for example, students were taught how to engage in the “Kick Game,” an activity requiring parents to massage the area of the mother’s belly where the fetus had kicked, wait for a response, and then massage again to set up a sort of in utero Morse communication. After two months of this conditioning, the curriculum expanded to teaching the fetus Dr. Van de Carr’s “primary-word list,” which included words such as “pat,” “rub,” “squeeze,” “shake,” “stroke,” and “tap.” Parents were instructed to use a rolled-up newspaper as a megaphone to direct their voices at the fetus while conveying the associated actions via her pregnant tummy at least twice a day. Three or four weeks before birth, the fetus’s curriculum was further enriched with a “secondary-word list,” since, according to the Prenatal University’s president, the fetus was now ready to learn words she “might need to know in the first few months after birth,” including “tongue,” “powder,” “burp,” “yawn,” “ice cream,” and “throw up.” As extra credit, really ambitious parents could teach Infantspeak, ten words Van de Carr deemed critical for early talking: “dada,” “mama,” and “bye-bye,” as well as “din din” (for food other than milk) and “poo poo” (for diaper change). At birth, the baby received her degree: “Baby Superior.” At this point, explained Van de Carr in a newspaper interview, “the child is already a success, has already achieved, is already a winner … the parents’ expectations have already been met.” Now, he said, parents “can just relax and enjoy their baby.”
Fetal conditioning was just the start for many 1980s superbabies. The importance of auditory stimulation in utero was further emphasized in the parenting book How to Have a Smarter Baby. Written by a professor of nursing and a lay writer, the book counseled expectant parents to play recordings of their own voices or soothing music, which, the book’s jacket copy misleadingly claimed, would be part of “an easy 15-minute-a-day program that can raise your baby’s IQ as much as 27 to 30 points … and increase his or her attention span by as much 10 to 45 minutes.” Although the book’s authors would later try to backpedal on that extraordinary — and, ultimately, specious — claim, the word was out. For truly time-squeezed superwomen unable to enroll in fetal classes, technology had a solution. Newspaper and television stories reported seeing pregnant women on the way to work with a Sony Walkman stretched across the belly, piping in recordings of Laurence Olivier reading sonnets. Gadgets such as the Pregaphone, which resembled an oversize stethoscope, claimed to be able to do that job better than a home-jiggered Walkman. Making its debut at the 1986 consumer trade show Babyfair — its third annual show of the latest in infant and toddler products — the Pregaphone was launched while Susan K. Golant, coauthor of How to Have a Smarter Baby, spoke on a Babyfair panel, emphasizing that the point of her book was not “creating superbabies … the point is having well-loved babies.”
PLAYLAB
Companies that make educational or “learning” toys for very young children today still cleave to some of the corporate traditions of their predecessors. For example, in the 1940s Playskool and Fisher-Price put experts on the payroll and later built product-testing facilities where local children were invited to put prototype toys through their paces. The companies gave these facilities scientific-sounding names such as the Playskool Institute and Fisher-Price’s PlayLab, and asked child development experts to assist in product research. It was a maneuver of marketing genius. These testing facilities acquired the patina of respected institutions, which lent the toys educational legitimacy and allowed the toy companies to take advantage of children’s curiosity and parents’ status seeking to conduct usability studies and market research for free. Today, instead of inviting experts with advanced degrees to visit the lab, companies hire them to run the labs full-time.
Kathleen Alfano, who holds a Ph.D. in elementary education, has headed Fisher-Price’s PlayLab for more than twenty years. Her assistants are all certified in early childhood education. LeapFrog’s lab staff is even more academically distinguished. It is headed by Jim Gray, who earned a Ph.D. in early childhood development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was a protégé of Howard Gardner, the celebrated author of Multiple Intelligences. Gray manages two full-time assistants, one of whom holds a doctorate in developmental psychology; the other earned a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s renowned Media Lab, where cutting-edge robotics and learning technologies are researched. Both PlayLab and the LeapFrog Lab are state-of-the-art facilities, equipped with one-way-mirrored observation rooms and professional video resources. PlayLab is set up as a preschool, with areas for imaginative play, outdoor activities, and snack. In western New York State, gaining admission to PlayLab has an elite aura comparable to that of enrolling in a private Manhattan preschool. Many parents reportedly sign up their babies at birth, and many of those parents are PlayLab graduates themselves; according to Alfano, PlayLab is now seeing its third generation of participants. The waiting time to become a child tester at PlayLab is often more than two years. To prepare families for their visit to the lab, Fisher-Price issues a professionally produced videotape detailing the experience in store for them. The children who participate in product research at PlayLab are not paid. Company spokespeople say that the excitement of being part of the development process is reward enough for the children and their families. Some PlayLab graduates are selected as unpaid models for photo shoots for Fisher-Price’s toy packaging. “That’s our way of giving back to our community,” according to a public relations assistant.
The Leapfrog Lab generates a similarly exclusive atmosphere. With a database of thousands of families in the Bay Area who have volunteered their children, Gray estimates that roughly three thousand children pass through the LeapFrog Lab every year. As payment, they may receive a gift certificate or a toy, but, as at PlayLab, the chief reward is getting to come at all. Even the most enthusiastic participants are not invited to return, however. Once they grow savvy about answering marketers’ and product designers’ questions they are no longer considered “fresh blood”: children whose perspective is untainted by the market research process. Gray surmises that LeapFrog Lab volunteers — or their parents — may feel that the testing conveys on them some of the distinction of junior inventors or scientists.
LeapFrog
