The parent trap

We assume for kids that it's totally fascinating because they're glued to it, but as a neuroscientist will tell you, a baby's brain at this stage is actually trained to look at anything that moves or changes within specific time periods, which is what Baby Einstein does.

Parents are saying: "Oh my God, my child is mesmerized. He loves it!" Maybe. We don't know what is going on inside their brain. Maybe they're like Alex in "A Clockwork Orange," and they're forced to watch these images that they want nothing to do with, and yet they can't move.

Baby Einstein is one of the most successful marketing bamboozlings of the American parenting marketplace. There is absolutely no evidence that Baby Einstein makes your baby smarter. We forget that 20 years ago, there was no programming for babies. If you wanted to really occupy your kid, if you didn't have a playpen, or if that wasn't enticing, you just turned on the TV and stuck them in front of "Days of Our Lives," and they would stare at it. The fact is that they may even have gotten more from "Days of Our Lives" than they would from Baby Einstein, because it was actual human faces emoting, as opposed to these random blaring images.

If Baby Einstein had been called "Couch Potato Kiddie," and the marketing had been "Get your child started on the joys of watching television as early as possible," that would have been honest marketing, and that really is what parents are buying.

What's the story with baby sign language?

Baby sign language sounds ludicrous, and then you have kids, and it sounds reasonable. When you first hear it, you're like: "That's completely insane. Why would you teach a baby who can hopefully hear perfectly well how to speak sign language?" Then, you have a baby, and you're like, "My baby has been crying for 20 minutes and grunting, and I have no idea if it's because he is constipated or he is hungry." So, why not teach him baby sign language? They learn all these cute little signs about how to say "I've had enough " or "I want more" or "Give me a grape."

It's an enormous industry. There are classes, there are DVDs, there are books. The Internet has a whole baby sign language universe on it. Some of the research on the face of it sounds really promising: If your baby uses baby sign language by age 8 their I.Q. will be 12 points higher! The truth is, any gains these babies have over babies who don't learn to sign are minimal and ephemeral.

There may be a period of like 2 months where the baby who signed is a little bit more talky than the one who didn't, but then they're all caught up by the age of 2 and a half. It's a diversion that they don't really need. The truth is, a lot of the things that we do with babies, they are often better off left alone.

This is one of the lessons that parents who have more than one kid eventually learn. You're totally in your first kid's face, and you've got the whoozit over them, and you're putting them under the stimulation mobile.

You're incredibly in their face the entire time. When you have two kids that is no longer possible, and what happens when you have a second kid is you notice that actually that kid is being ignored, and they're OK. They're surviving, and in fact, they're probably doing a lot more interesting things of their own volition than the first baby was when you were throwing things in their face constantly.

Do you think that parents now are more susceptible to this kind of marketing, or is there just so much marketing that it's not surprising that many parents are being taken in by it?

I think it's both. Parents are definitely more susceptible. We're more time strapped. Both parents are often working. They're often working more than one job. Their hours are longer. When they're home, they're not entirely home, because they're on e-mail, they're on the phone, they're on the Internet. There are so many distractions.

What that means is that we want anything that is going to make our lives easier, and it also means that we feel incredibly guilty about any moment that we're not paying attention to our kids, or when we're not there. What the parenting industry has done is created products and services to allegedly take care of those fears and needs.

The parenting industry has also gotten a lot bigger and a lot more sophisticated. If you want to find out what you should do about spanking, it's not like you flip open your Dr. Spock anymore. There are 10,000 books and Web sites, so many sources of information and experts out there that can tell you what to do about spanking. They all contradict each other, but you can basically devote three weeks of your life to reading about spanking, whereas parents didn't have those resources before.

Isn't it the parents' job to be able to differentiate hype from substance in the sea of marketing? And aren't we supposed to be arming our children with the ability to do the same as they get older?

Well, yeah, sure. But we're not doing it. And I think that we're not teaching our kids to do it. We're actually teaching our children inadvertent lessons. The growth in the luxury market for babies has just been astounding in the last 10 years. If you buy luxury clothes for your child, you think: "What's the harm in that? What does a baby know anyway?"

And yet, psychologists say children learn brand identification at an incredibly young age, well before they're able to articulate it. A lot of these messages are subconscious, and what we're teaching kids by inundating them with luxury gear is what is worthwhile about life. If a parent is working around the clock to make money in order to be able to afford Giorgio Armani Bambino clothes, what kind of values are we instilling in them?

What is your advice to parents who want to avoid being suckered?

At the most basic level reuse, recycle, repurpose. The average American child gets 70 new toys a year. That is just so far beyond what is necessary. Most child gear, toys, books are a lot cheaper, relatively speaking, than they were decades ago. In the aggregate it ends up being a lot more expensive, because we're buying a lot more of it, but kids just don't need that many toys. Kids lose out when things become less special.

There is this feeling that if I don't do everything that I can for my child I'm cheaping out on my kid, and I'm not giving them all the advantages. Underpinning this is a huge amount of economic anxiety. We're incredibly fearful that for the next generation things are going to be a lot tougher, in a seriously competitive, not very rewarding global marketplace. Question before you make any purchase whether what you're doing is to assuage your angst, guilt and fear, and if it's actually going to make a material difference for your child.

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)