The littlest shoppers

Will buying educational toys make your kid a genius -- or just leave you broke? Author Susan Gregory Thomas cuts through the baby-business babble.

By Helaine Olen

Read more: Babies, Toys, Life

May 30, 2007 | Baby Einstein videos, infant gym classes, talking toys that teach phonics: Every year more and more American parents snap up the latest kid-centric luxuries, convinced they can provide their children with a head start on everything from education to socialization. But are the secrets of good parenting really on sale at Toys "R" Us? Not according to journalist Susan Gregory Thomas. In her new book, "Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds," Thomas contends that rather than enriching young minds, companies like Baby Einstein and Nickelodeon have become lifestyle brands for chic toddlers and have turned little ones into restless shoppers long before they understand the concept of buying. Eager marketers plaster familiar faces like Bob the Builder and Elmo on everything from books to blocks to Band-Aids in an effort to goose the bottom line. Even the train table in the Barnes & Noble children's department is a marketing ploy, placed there by the company peddling Thomas the Tank Engine toys.

Thomas is not the first to point out that much of the booming baby business -- a market she says is now worth $20 billion annually -- is a bunch of bogus hocus-pocus designed to separate parents from their cash. Last year, the child advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that the claims made by Baby Einstein's marketers amounted to false and deceptive advertising. More recently, the Education Sector, a well-respected research organization, released a report calling most so-called educational toys a crock.

But where Thomas' book excels is in her dissection of the ways in which the marketing juggernaut ultimately affects us all. Toddlers without a television in their home still recognize Elmo. Marketing firms with innocent-sounding names like the Geppetto Group specialize in pitching products to kids and teens. Even politicians such as Sen. Hillary Clinton and President Bush have fallen for aspects of the consumerist toddler zeitgeist. In fact, they might be said to bookend the business: Clinton helped launch the craze in the mid-1990s when she began citing studies on the important role the first three years of life play in child development. And Bush gave Baby Einstein the ultimate product placement, mentioning it and creator Julie Aigner-Clark in his 2007 State of the Union address.

Salon caught up with Thomas in New York, where she discussed the origins of the baby buying boom, how marketers prey on Generation X parenting practices and why -- and how -- moms and dads should fight back.

When did the "baby business" boom, as we know it today, begin?

Well, in 1994, the Carnegie Corp. published a report called "Starting Points." It was an investigation of new neurological research about how infant minds grow. It pointed out that you're never more open than you are in the first three years -- that's when you learn the foundations of physical activity, emotional security and cognitive development. The report got the attention of Hillary Clinton and actor Rob Reiner, and they put together a White House Council meeting in 1997 on the importance of the first three years. The aim was to put political pressure on Congress for federal support for early childcare. But the lasting legacy of this conference was not federal funding for early childcare. It was the "baby genius" zeitgeist.

Right around the same time as the White House conference, another, more specious study came out about what was called "the Mozart effect." It suggested that college-age kids would score marginally better on intelligence tests if they were played a certain section of a certain sonata by Mozart.

Julie Aigner-Clark, a very canny mother of a toddler, took note of that study. And she put together what we now know as the Baby Einstein empire, and Baby Mozart was the first video she developed. She based a lot of her ideas for stimulating the infant brain on this strange conflation of cultural trends: that babies were active geniuses and you really had to stimulate them adequately before they turned 3, otherwise they would never get into college, and the idea you would sort of be made smarter in math and spatial reasoning if you listened to Mozart.

But you write that there is no evidence that educational videos and the like do anything for infants and toddlers. So how do Baby Einstein and other similar companies convince parents otherwise?

Noam Chomsky said it best when he said the consumer economy takes our concerns, commodifies them and sells them back to us. If you look at the marketing rubric of, for example, Baby Einstein, what they talk about is enhancing a baby's natural curiosity. But what's so fascinating about it is that there is absolutely no research that undergirds those statements. There just isn't any. It's all marketing.

The book describes a number of companies that specialize in marketing materials to children, including Scholastic, the publisher of the beloved Harry Potter series. What is their strategy?

One of the things Scholastic started doing was to develop preschool curricula for media conglomerates. Disney, for example, is one of its biggest customers. Scholastic will develop a whole curriculum around a television show and have posters and activities and all kinds of things that preschool teachers can use. Disney pays Scholastic to develop it and offers it to the schools for free.

By and large, teachers and places are thrilled to have the free stuff. They'll hang the posters on the wall and they'll save the videos for a rainy day. It has a ripple effect because parents see that their child is watching Scholastic-approved videos in school, and they buy the idea that it must be educationally appropriate and vetted by the experts.

Next page: "Why would they put SpongeBob on that macaroni and cheese?"