in the past decade something unique, and uniquely concerning, has been unfolding with the past decade’s development of a baby and toddler market. For one, the long-term impact of the baby genius phenomenon may be anything but educational. Many in the field of early child development suspect that babies and toddlers reared on TV, videos, and blinking, beeping “smart” toys may ultimately suffer from cognitive problems. Diane E. Levin, a professor in the early childhood education department at Wheelock College in Boston, calls the phenomenon “problem-solving deficit disorder.” Levin contends that such products essentially overstimulate very young children, so that instead of using their own resources to solve a problem or an uncomfortable feeling — Mom is in the shower, boredom, and so on — they apply those resources to processing the dazzling object that has been placed before them. Over time, Levin says, babies and toddlers accustomed to getting this kind of sensory “hit” when they feel uncomfortable may not just become dependent on having that hit but may even lose the ability to work through feelings and ideas independently or with the help of a trusted friend. Marie Anzalone, who is on the faculty of Columbia University’s occupational therapy program, reports that she frequently treats very young children from low-income as well as upper-middle-class families who appear glazed over and numb, which she believes is an ingrained response to overstimulation from technology toys and television. These toddlers simply cannot integrate the sensory overload to which they are routinely subjected; to cope, they begin to tune out.
Constant distractions are known to impair children’s cognitive development in other ways, too. A University of Massachusetts study conducted by the preeminent academic researcher Daniel R. Anderson on the effects of television on young children showed that even the seemingly benign practice of keeping the television running in the background at home can be disastrous for toddlers’ development because it interferes with their ability to concentrate on their own activities. The study reported that one-year-olds’ focused play is reduced by half when the television is on, even if the children are not specifically tuning in to the programming. Focused play — which, as the celebrated preschool pioneer Maria Montessori pointed out, is the work of childhood — is essential for normal cognitive development. In other words, it is essential for little brains to grow.
INCREASED DEPRESSION
The baby genius phenomenon has paved the way for the commercialization of early childhood, and that has raised the stakes higher still. In 2004 the American Psychological Association strongly recommended that advertising and marketing to children under the age of eight be restricted. The reason for the organization’s admonition was that children in that age group do not understand persuasion. They may recognize that an ad looks different from a television show or a magazine article, but they do not grasp its intent to persuade an audience to buy something. They don’t understand that what the ad suggests may not be entirely true or that the product depicted in an advertisement may not look the way it is presented. Their capacity to think abstractly on this level has nothing to do with intelligence; it is indicative of a developmental milestone corresponding with age level. If a seven-year-old cannot understand that SpongeBob is there to sell her junk food, how can a baby understand this? What are the long-term effects of being raised in such a marketing culture, not only to one’s mind but to one’s sense of self and spirit?
It is clear to see how these effects are manifested as children grow older. In her extensive study of Boston-area children between the ages of ten and thirteen, Juliet B. Schor, a sociologist and the author of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, sought to determine whether involvement in consumer culture had any effect on children’s general well-being. Over a period of three years, Schor and her team of graduate students administered a questionnaire consisting of more than 150 questions covering media use, consumer values and involvement in consumer culture, relationships with parents, demographic variables, and measures of physical and mental well-being. Defining “consumer involvement” on a spectrum of identifiers ranging from “I feel like other kids have more stuff than I do” and “I care a lot about my games, toys, and other possessions” to “I like watching commercials,” the study’s results were striking. Regardless of the participants’ socioeconomic, educational, or cultural background, Schor found that “high consumer involvement is a significant cause of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and psychosomatic complaints.” She also found a clear causal and reflexive relationship between consumer involvement and health: “Less involvement in consumer culture leads to healthier kids, and more involvement leads kids’ psychological well-being to deteriorate.” Finally, “Higher levels of consumer involvement result in worse relationships with parents, which also leads to increased depression, anxiety, lower self-esteem and more psychosomatic complaints.”
THE INFLUENCE OF MARKETING
My research for this book began in the mid-1990s, when I was a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report. At that newsweekly, many of the editors in title are reporters in fact, and it was my job to cover technology as it related to consumers as well as business.
In 1997 I started to get calls from consumer software companies wanting to set up press appointments to demonstrate what they were calling “lapware” — educational software for infants and toddlers, who would sit on a parent’s lap while they used the software. The lapware that most companies showed me seemed to be digital versions of cause-and-effect toys. Instead of twisting a plastic key to release a pop-up plastic animal, infants would bang on the keyboard for the reward of seeing stars and shapes sparkling across the monitor. The lapware for toddlers — largely aimed at children between the ages of two and five — was more overtly academic. It was easy for parents to assume that software with titles such as JumpStart and Reader Rabbit was “educational,” and what’s more, it seemed to provide an important computer experience. According to the software firms, new scientific research on the brain had shown that a person never learns more than in the first three years of life; after that the window closes, and opportunities to grow new neurons and build the foundation for future brain power are lost. As the White House Conference had shown, they argued, failure to stimulate a growing brain could have serious consequences down the line.
At that point in technology history, computers enjoyed a virtually unimpeachable reputation as educational instruments. The overwhelming sentiment at the time was that by using computers even for the most mundane tasks, children were not only learning a particular skill but were also becoming smarter in the process. A great many people, of great social and economic influence, seemed to believe that “kids today” were smarter because they could do things like insert a CD-ROM into the appropriate disk drive and build Web sites using HTML software. But the archaeological and anthropological record shows that children have always begun using the predominant tools of their culture at around four or five years old. Kids were no more sophisticated for using computers in Newton, Massachusetts, in the mid-nineties than for learning how to use bows and arrows in the prehistoric Lenape nation. The real change, it seemed, was the influence of marketing: people believed it.
That was certainly true for the technology industry as a whole. Ingenious marketing and public relations campaigns could take a great deal of the credit for the heady success of the tech economy of the nineties. I was especially impressed by the Palm marketing team, which did a phenomenal job of convincing not just harried dot-com CEOs but everyone else who had relied on paper datebooks that they would not be able to get organized without a hundred-dollar hand-held digital gizmo. It was common knowledge that Microsoft and Intel kept upping the ante with new versions of Windows that demanded ever-faster processors; then PR departments helped drive the fear of becoming obsolete, which accelerated the upgrade cycle. Internet providers fed concerns that if you didn’t have a Web site, you would be denied access to the digital age.
But while PR and marketing firms may have boosted unit sales, they were not entirely responsible for a massive change in cultural sensibility. The Web itself was doing that. It is easy to forget that until the mid-nineties, e-mail was still a clunky mode of communication employed mostly by techies and academics. Most other e-mail correspondence was restricted to private systems, such as internal corporate networks.
