first LeapPad debuted as the Phonics Desk in 1995, with some success. But in 1999 it was relaunched as the LeapPad Learning System and became the industry’s top-selling toy in December 2000 — the first for an educational toy in more than fifteen years. Today LeapPad’s hardware component has a list price of fifty dollars, with LeapPad-compatible “books” listing for fifteen dollars apiece. This makes the LeapPad one of the most expensive mass-produced toys on the market, but that has not impeded sales. According to the company, 77 percent of U.S. households with young children own a LeapPad.
Quickly, LeapFrog sought to reach even younger consumers. In 2001, the company released My First LeapPad, which is shaped like a bus and geared to three- to five-year-olds; in 2003, the LittleTouch LeapPad (list price thirty-five dollars) debuted, aimed at babies and toddlers from six to thirty-six months. LeapFrog’s product line had always been geared to the age range from prekindergarten — four-year-olds — to the tail end of junior high school. But its forays into the baby and toddler toy category were so successful that LeapFrog officially launched its LeapFrog Baby line in 2004 with great fanfare at the International Toy Fair, the annual trade show held in New York City. By 2006 the lineup had grown far beyond the LittleTouch LeapPad and plush interactive dolls to include more than three dozen toys, including the Learning Piano, which offers three “LeapStages” activity cards that trigger different musical and voice recordings (names of instruments and how they sound; snippets of songs like “London Bridge”; and a counting song featuring a cow, two pigs, three sheep, four cats, and five ducks); the Learn & Groove Musical Table, which plays forty “learning songs” and introduces letters and numbers in English or Spanish; the Learn & Groove Alphabet Drum, which, with each bang, displays letters from A to Z in lights while a recorded voice identifies each one (again, in either English or Spanish); and the Learn & Groove Counting Maracas, which count from one to ten, name colors, and pronounce vocabulary words with each shake.
The highlight for LeapFrog at the 2006 toy fair, where the product was placed center stage in a mock living room complete with comfy leather chairs and a large-screen TV, was Baby’s Little Leaps Grow-With-Me Learning System. The product includes a console base/DVD player connected to a TV and a wireless controller with two sides: the baby side, recommended for infants from nine to twenty-four months, has oversized buttons; the toddler side, twenty-four months and up, features a joystick. Press materials explained that the infant or toddler affects what happens onscreen by “exposing” himself to “active learning experiences that change with every touch, slide and toggle.” A brand manager explained that the product’s goal was to “bathe the child in language.” Like other LeapFrog products, the manager said, the Little Leaps system is “about giving Moms and Dads the tools they need to help children learn.” Indeed, LeapFrog Baby’s mission from the outset was to support parents in helping their babies and toddlers learn. It came from a key piece of market research, a product line manager explained: “We talked to moms, and they told us there were a lot of developmental toys for baby out there, but that there were no ‘learning’ toys.”
STARTING POINTS
Ask a child developmental psychologist or an early childhood educator to discuss the distinction between a “developmental” and a “learning” toy for infants and toddlers, and you will be met with a puzzled look. In early child development, the commonly accepted understanding is that there is really no difference between development and learning for infants and toddlers: they are one and the same. While it may be possible to tease apart cognitive learning from socioemotional learning from physical learning starting with the late twos and three-year-olds — when toddlers begin to become more social and, therefore, developmentally capable of practicing empathy — it is not possible to separate these types before that age. A physical milestone, such as learning to walk, is inextricably linked with the socioemotional milestone of learning to separate from the mother or other regular caregiver; this independence is, in turn, inextricably linked with the cognitive milestone of learning to assign words or gestures to specific things or personal needs. Furthermore, “learning” takes place in a social context — that is, between a young child and a caregiver. It is specifically through this interaction that young children create what Lev Vygotsky — generally considered to be Piaget’s counterpart in child development — called “mental tools.” After a child has acquired these mental tools, she may apply them in a wide variety of situations. That is, an eight-year-old who has mastered fine motor skills, has the ability to think abstractly and understand symbols, and has a certain level of comfort with technology can use a computer effectively. A baby cannot.
The idea that there is a difference between “learning” and “development” may have taken root with the 1994 publication of a Carnegie Corporation report focusing on the care of infants and toddlers — children from zero to three years old. The report was called Starting Points, and, like other federally commissioned reports before it, this one underscored the need for high-quality child care and health care, as well as parent education and support for families with young children. But this report was different from its predecessors in that it highlighted neuroscience as a justification for providing federally funded services for babies and toddlers. The Carnegie task force maintained that between the ages of zero and three, neural synapses formed far more quickly than scientists had previously understood. The way the brain developed in the long run depended profoundly on a child’s experience during these first critical years. Moreover, young children subjected to severe neglect would suffer irrevocable neural damage. At least, those conclusions could be surmised from the extant data. Actually, the report admitted, “researchers say that neurobiologists using brain scan technologies are on the verge of confirming these findings.”
While it was accurate to say that a gust of synaptic connections are made in the baby brain, some in the field said that this was not news; such findings were at least a decade old at that point. Also, the report did not emphasize that the very young brain was doing the equally important work of pruning back the thicket of synaptic connections. Without this editing process, the brain would be continuously and intolerably overwhelmed, unable to make meaningful connections or draw conclusions — in short, unable to make sense of the world.
The report briefly acknowledged that no neuroscientific research substantiated the suggestion that babies and toddlers raised in impoverished circumstances were doomed to long-term cognitive deficits. Nor was there any evidence proving that an “enriched” environment in early childhood led to increased social, emotional, and intellectual prowess later in life. Studies had shown that mice kept in a state of privation grew far fewer brain synapses than those raised in stimulating, nurturing environments. But the brain-scan technologies that the Carnegie task force referred as “on the verge of confirming these findings” could not be used on healthy infants. Positron emission tomography (PET), one of the brain-imaging technologies that allows scientists to observe neural activity in living subjects, requires the injection of radioactive substances that scientists are legally and ethically forbidden from administering to normal, healthy children. The other technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), requires absolute stillness. There were simply no data on normal, healthy infants or toddlers, nor were any parents likely to give permission for their children to be studied under such circumstances.
TOXIC OR NONTOXIC
The report did, however, impress two heavyweights: Rob Reiner and Hillary Clinton. The actor-writer-director launched the child advocacy group I Am Your Child (since renamed Parents’ Action for Children) in 1997, a campaign to publicize what his promotional materials characterized as the latest “breakthroughs in brain research” in children from zero to three. Reiner’s efforts were driven by the conviction that if America’s parents and policymakers realized the importance and lifelong impact of neural activity in the first three years, the result could be a cultural transformation. As Reiner proclaimed in a 1998 address to the National Association of Counties: “Whether or not a child becomes a toxic or nontoxic member of society is largely determined by what happens to the child in terms of his experiences with his parents and primary caregivers in those first three years … justice begins in the high chair, not the electric chair.”
What
