that spoke in Japanese, French, and Spanish phonemes when babies whacked it, and VTech’s Muzzart, a cuddly dog that played tinny Mozart. For the story, I had interviewed a broad range of child development experts, including Jerome and Dorothy Singer at Yale’s Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy and Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. Along with her colleagues Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl at the University of Washington, Gopnik wrote The Scientist in the Crib, a fascinating look at the newest research on how babies learn. Every one of the experts I consulted said that such toys offered no special advantage. They were products of marketing, not research.
By the time my child was born, shows such as Blue’s Clues, Dora the Explorer, and Clifford the Big Red Dog ruled the preschool airwaves, and the starring characters were licensed everywhere. Baby Einstein videos had become some of the most popular baby shower gifts in the country. As I, along with all the other new moms in my New York neighborhood, struggled into our new parental skin, I noticed that many were turning on these shows or videos of the baby-genius variety for their babies and toddlers. The general response in my urban, liberal, educated group seemed to be: “I don’t know if it’s going to make my baby into a genius, but he loves it, and it lets me take a shower.” The consensus was that it couldn’t hurt: we were all raised on TV, after all, and we didn’t turn out to be completely brain-dead. Many of the parents were uncertain that the Baby Einstein–type videos really would help stimulate their babies’ budding neurons. But if there really was something magic in them, how could we not show it to them?
You might think that because I had already done a fair amount of reporting in this area and interviewed experts at the top of this field I would be immune to such questions. You would be wrong. I was freaking out. Maybe those experts were just cynical academics, elitists who would rave about the virtues of wooden blocks until your eyes rolled. Maybe, in spite of my years covering technology, I was finally becoming a Luddite myself. And maybe it was better to let young children share the culture of their peers so they wouldn’t feel like hothouse orchids: pure and precious, unable to survive outside a rarefied environment. Finally, maybe mother really did know best. Maybe moms could sense something in their own children’s responses that no research psychologist would ever be able to tease out or interpret properly. That is, maybe Julie Aigner-Clark’s maternal instincts were better qualifications for grasping the infant mind than all those people with Ph.D.’s in child psychology.
But my background as a technology journalist seems to have saddled me with the curse and gift of extreme suspicion of marketing comeons. Having learned over the years that most marketing and PR campaigns are based on a lot of illusory fluff — and knowing what a sham lapware was — I couldn’t help wondering if the wool was being pulled over our newly maternal eyes with this stuff, too. Also, my memory was that television had generally been the purview of older kids, starting at around four. What, exactly, was the effect of toddler television and babies’ videos on the really little watchers?
But it wasn’t until my seventeen-month-old toddler first saw an Elmo video and within minutes memorized the “Elmo’s World” theme song and within days spotted Elmo on every licensed packaged product we encountered in the supermarket, bookstore, toy store, and library — and begun referring to these Elmo products as “Elmo diapers” or “Elmo books” — that I knew there was definitely something behind that friendly, furry face. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt it was worth looking into. This book is a report of what I found.
IT IS MARCH 2004, around nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning in the Bay Area’s industrial-chic city of Emeryville, California. Although Beth, a producer at the technology toy company LeapFrog, is in the final stage of pregnancy — the bulky, drowsy stage — she is sharp and energetic as she discusses the features of a new toy prototype. Beth is one of the top producers in the LeapFrog Baby division, launched in 2004, and all eyes — both internally and in the business world at large — are watching closely. As with its products for older children, LeapFrog must protect its brand integrity by ensuring that its toys for infants and toddlers are designed for optimal learning. The prototype Beth is describing is an interactive plush frog that she and her team have been working on for several months. Some people who work here say that you can feel a high-pitched vibration in the air when a new product presentation is in progress. Then again, you can sense that vibe just about anytime at LeapFrog.
Walk by any cubicle in LeapFrog’s loftlike headquarters, and you see casually dressed product designers and producers gripping oversize stainless steel coffee mugs as they discuss a current project or weigh in with verve on someone else’s. Whiteboards are inscribed with diagrams and flow charts. There is something of a time-capsule feeling at LeapFrog, as if all the creative, manic, Ivy League energy that was evenly distributed throughout the Bay Area during the e-business era of the 1990s were preserved in these offices. Then that energy was largely directed at convincing Wall Street that Web-based business-to-business (B2B) companies would be the pillars of the New Economy. Now, at LeapFrog, it is aimed at making toys that enhance children’s cognitive development, or, as the company consistently styles it, learning.
Beth is clearly on this wavelength as the group begins describing the prototype’s features. It is designed to be a toddler’s special buddy, helping him through tricky transitions or prompting him to reach important milestones that research says are critical features of socioemotional learning. When the child is struggling to settle down for a nap, for example, he can squeeze the doll’s arm and hear a particularly soothing voice — his mother’s — urging him to nod off. A simple voice recorder embedded in the toy allows the child’s mother to record herself expressing encouraging commands: “Potty time, Aidan!” or “Would you like an apple or raisins for snack now?” or “Night-night, lambchop!” An important feature of the voice recorder is that the doll can convey the family’s own particular language instead of the canned terms that LeapFrog producers might record. That is, one family might say “potty,” while another might use “toilet.” This kind of personalization is key, Beth emphasizes, because the research says that when toddlers are repeatedly exposed to terms with which they are familiar, their learning is enhanced. Her colleagues nod.
After a period of silence, a perplexed visitor raises a question: might it be unsettling for a toddler to hear his mother’s disembodied voice channeled through the toy? Toddlers are famous for their phobias: could this set off fears that his mother has somehow embedded herself in the toy? What will he think when the voice doesn’t answer him as his mother does, but in these prerecorded snippets? The eminent child psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott argued that a young child who becomes emotionally attached to a stuffed animal is projecting the feelings of love and security he feels with his mother onto this inanimate creature when she is not present. If that is the case, what are the psychological ramifications of channeling her voice through a toy? Beth looks at her boss uncomfortably. He twiddles his pencil. “Well,” he says after a few moments, “I guess we have to say that we put the mother’s voice in because the research said that babies’ and toddlers’ social interaction with the mother enhances learning.”
SMART TOYS
Over the past decade, the emphasis on offering learning experiences to babies and toddlers has created a dizzying array of industries, both cottage and well beyond. Today thousands of classes are offered for infants and toddlers, ranging from sign language to early music training to gymnastics, as well as classes that teach new mothers how to simply relax and do nothing with their infants. Parents often view these classes as prerequisites for getting into a good preschool, according to market research groups conducted by the Gymboree Corporation. Classes are often supplemented by videos or DVDs marketed as being developmentally appropriate for a toddler audience.
