http://www.erikvance.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Baby-Toys-Final.pdf
Hundreds of toys promise to help babies read, learn, do math and walk
earlier than expected — many without scientific backing
By Erik Vance
When Seth Pollak's son was a year old, he and his wife, Jenny Saffran,
took a trip to the Babies "R" Us store near their home in Madison,
Wis. They wanted to buy a teething ring— nothing special, just a
frozen band to numb the baby's gums. Passing through the bears and
bicycles, they found the correct display. They pulled a pricey package
off the shelf, which read, "Promotes oral motor and language
development."
IN BRIEF
So-called educational toys make myriad claims about helping babies
read, learn, do math and walk early, but little science backs them up.
Even if babies do make early advances, research fails to show that a
jump leads to any long-term advantages. Fast-paced video and TV
imagery can hamper a baby's ability to understand the pace of the
world, leading to attentional problems.
The greatest benefit from play comes from interacting with another
human being—so parents should be present and not stress out.
HIGHLIGHTS
$4 BILLION North American educational toy market
$2.8 BILLION Global education apps market for ages 0–4
7+ DVDs owned by the average 18-month-old
The couple had never heard of oral motor development, but it sounded
important. Typical parents— worried about their child falling
behind—might have bought the product without thinking. But Pollak and
Saffran are not typical parents. "My wife is one of the world's
leading experts in language development, and we are both Ph.D.s in
developmental psychology," Pollak explains. "We are looking at this,
and we're like, 'What the hell? How in the world does chewing on a
cold thing promote language?'" There is little evidence to say it
does. And the claim is just one example of the disconnect between the
research and marketing of child development. Every parent wants his or
her baby to have an early jump on life. Shouldn't toys be part of
that? If your baby plays with the right gizmos during the right
developmental window, the sales pitch goes, she or he could become
smarter, more coordinated and more successful than other babies. But
the very idea that the purpose of a toy is to give your baby an edge
"fundamentally misunderstands what's happening in development," says
Alison Gopnik, a columnist and leading child psychologist at the
University of California, Berkeley. Even if experts could devise such
products, "we would have defeated the whole point of childhood,"
which, she asserts, is for the child to build himself or herself.
Whether it is a black-and-white mobile that supposedly catches a
baby's eye or a caterpillar that teaches your toddler to code,
American toys that promote child development are rampant.
But do they work? According to Gopnik and many developmental
psychologists, there is a gaping hole between products and research.
Too often toys come with claims based on either questionable science
or none at all. Yet the North American educational toy market is
estimated at more than $4 billion in 2018 and is grow ing rapidly,
according to research firm Technavio. Experts say that is because of a
deep insecurity in American parents. Has their daughter breast-fed too
long? Not long enough? Is their son in the right preschool? If babies
are not crawling, walking, talking, reading and even doing math early,
then they are doing it late. "Kids are surrounded by a panicked, kind
of fearful culture. 'Oh, my God, you're falling behind,'" says Barbara
Sarnecka, a cognitive scientist at the University of California,
Irvine, who studies language and math acquisition. Although scientists
are fervently trying to understand how the human brain develops and
how to help babies and toddlers who are truly developmentally or
socially lagging, many toy makers seem to suggest you can supercharge
the average kid. Are there any findings that might support these
claims?
EARLIER IS NOT BETTER
Marketing to parents' anxieties begins the moment sperm meets egg.
Expectant mothers must carefully manage nutrition, vitamins and stress
for fear that any mistakes might have lasting effects on their
children. Of course, your fetus needs the proper music. That's right:
the fast track to a prized life starts with music in the womb. There
are a number of products that come with speakers that attach to a
woman's belly to play music. One gadget, Babypod , goes a step
further: it is a bulb-shaped silicone speaker that is inserted inside
the woman's vagina. The product site says, "Our initial hypothesis
suggests that music creates a response which manifests as vocalisation
movements, as it activates the brain circuits that stimulate language
and communication. In other words, learning begins in utero." It is
true that babies learn while in the womb and that music is enriching
to young children. But there is no evidence that music enriches a
fetus. The creators of Babypod published a paper in the British
Medical Ultrasound Society's journal Ultrasound showing that fetuses
reacted more strongly to their product than to external speakers, but
it does not conclude that the reactions were positive or that this
strategy translated into smarter children. "I know of nothing out
there that says that this stimulation does anything for your baby,"
says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a developmental psychologist at Temple
University and president of the International Congress of Infant
Studies. Babypod did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
Hirsh-Pasek specializes in language acquisition in babies, which is a
huge research area and a rich target for claims. She says she displays
her least favorite toys marketed to anxious parents on a wall in her
office. Speaking is perhaps a baby's most important milestone and is
tied to later cognition and working memory. Studies show that babies
and young children have certain age windows during which these
abilities blossom. Some evidence suggests that how quickly babies
learn new words predicts later proclivity; loquacious children tend to
be loquacious in later childhood, too. But is earlier always better?
Scientists have tried to tie early speaking to intelligence for
decades. A 1982 study based in Ohio found early talkers often had
higher IQs later in life. Interestingly, however, the effect
disappeared when researchers controlled for cognitive problems and
socioeconomic status. This insight, Hirsh-Pasek says, is the crux.
Speaking early or late does not determine success; zip code does.
Poverty, food instability and violence create stress, and stress
delays speech and leads to academic disparity down the line. In many
stressful homes, infants simply are not spoken to enough and thus
suffer from a language gap that turns into a pervasive performance
gap. Yet many toy makers turn this situation into an unfounded
assumption: because lack of speech creates a deficit, extra speech
will pay dividends. Sarnecka says that is "just a fantasy—a fantasy
that's profitable." Mental stimulation for young children is like
vitamins—enough is important, but more is not better. Yet thousands of
apps for young children are available. And the average 18-month-old
has at least seven DVDs. "You think you've seen the worst, you know,
and then something else hits the market," Hirsh-Pasek says. "One of my
all-time favorites, of course, is Your Baby Can Read. To which I
answer, 'No, she cannot.'" Your Baby Can Read was a series of flash
cards, videos and books that purported to teach children from three
months to five years to read. The product was created by a researcher
named Robert Titzer, who claimed to have taught his two daughters to
read when they were babies. Conventional studies indicate babies
simply cannot understand the written word. Yet the company selling the
product offered impressive-sounding, though unpublished, studies and
charts, alongside glowing testimonials, including one about a
preschooler reading Harry Potter books. Hirsh-Pasek was not the only
one who noticed the aggressive advertising. The Federal Trade
Commission, which polices claims, opened two cases involving Titzer,
charging that companies he worked with were engaged in deceptive
practices. ftc lawyers reached out to Susan Neuman of New York
University to learn more. Neuman is an expert in language acquisition.
She had run a randomized controlled study comparing 61 babies who were
exposed to a reading program against 56 who were not and published the
results in the Journal of Educational Psychology. Based on 14
measures, such as speech processing, word learning, letter recognition
and reading with meaning, she found no difference between the two
groups. Well, almost none. Although the children using the program did
not advance beyond the others, their parents were convinced they had.
Titzer, for his part, told me he was never involved in marketing
decisions and would never have suggested toddlers can read Harry
Potter books. But he defends his product and says Neuman did not use
it correctly and asked inappropriate questions to test the babies'
learning. In the end, Titzer and the companies settled with the ftc in
2014 for $800,000. The ftc also promised much larger fines, should he
make similar claims again. He now runs Infant Learning Company, which
sells a set of DVDs, printed cards and books called Your Baby Can
Learn! The company also sells a kit called Your Child Can Read!; one
display line on the packaging says, "A Science Based Approach to
Learning." As for the marketing, Titzer says it has changed: "We have
babies looking at books. Everyone recommends that babies look at
books, so I don't see anything wrong with babies looking at books."
Dozens of studies indicate that many video learning programs fail to
show reliable results. Titzer insists that his products are measurably
superior and notes that he is working on a publication that vindicates
them. According to ftc lawyer Annette Soberats, who spoke with a
colleague who was involved in the Your Baby Can Read case, her agency
considers the matter closed.
FLASH CARDS + VIDEOS = MATH SKILLS
Of course, toys do not exist in a vacuum. There is some pressure from
consumers to make sure toys are educational, especially for the very
young, says Clement Chau, an expert in child development and a
director for toy company LeapFrog Enterprises. "I think there is a
tendency to say, 'I want my kid to go to Harvard, so I'm going to buy
them a toy from LeapFrog, and they will go to Harvard eventually,'" he
says. That viewpoint is unrealistic, but toys can be an integrated
part of learning, Chau adds. In the end, it is not clear that parents
can super charge their baby to boost his or her long-term abilities.
At least, that is what David Barner says. And he should know; he tried
like crazy to supercharge his daughter. Barner is an expert in the
development of math education for children. He knows math learning is
important for cognition and life skills. So he wanted his two-year-old
daughter to be a math whiz. He was never great at math himself—both he
and his wife preferred reading—but he saw its value. So for months he
spent time each day quizzing his child using products that utilize
flash cards, videos, games and comic books to teach math to toddlers
and preschoolers. In the end, although he delighted in watching a
young mind absorb math in real time, that is pretty much all he got,
while his daughter developed a distaste for math. Her true passion and
skill? Reading, of course. Speaking with his professional hat on,
Barner thinks parents have less impact on their kids than "things like
who your friends are, what school you go to, whether you have access
to good resources." Many analyses, such as an ongoing University of
Minnesota study with separated twins, also show that personality and
proclivities are surprisingly heritable. Barner's work has revealed
that many kids between three and five who can count and even seem to
do simple addition do not actually comprehend the principles of
numbers but use memorized tricks to get the right answers. Although
U.S. toddlers are intensely trained to count, they are quickly passed
in math skills by children in Asia.
GOING FOR GOLD
Not all parents want their little darling to win a Fields Medal for
mathematics. Some prefer Olympic gold. For that result, they look to
motor learning. "If my baby walked at 10 months instead of 13 months,
are they on a fast track to travel-team soccer?" asks Karen Adolph, a
child psychologist at New York University. "Does speeding up motor
skills have long-term effects?" Compared with language or math skills,
the motor-learning field is small, and many basic questions are still
wide open. But a few insights seem clear. The first is, shockingly,
that you can supercharge your baby's ability to sit, crawl and even
walk. In 1935 developmental psychologist Myrtle McGraw famously
trained one baby to swim, climb and roller skate while his twin
brother sat in a crib. But as soon as McGraw allowed the other brother
to play, he quickly caught up. "Practicing motor skills accelerates
motor skills in the short term," Adolph says. But there is "no
evidence that it does anything for the long term." If you want to
raise the next Usain Bolt or Nolan Ryan, early walking or throwing
probably will not matter. Such skills may, however, offer some
cognitive advantages; kids who can sit up can reach for things sooner,
and those who walk can explore their world earlier. Adolph says there
is another key difference between movement and cognition: the parents
she meets in the laboratory are far less worked up about motor
learning in their babies, which corresponds to the toy market as well.
No one is selling Your Baby Can Backflip. Some products, such as
little pushcarts and walkers, promise to help babies learn to walk,
but the marketing statements about that seem muted and secondary to
just having fun. If you give a baby a rattle, she or he will learn to
shake it. Is that the first step to becoming the drummer in a Rush
revival band? No. Adolph points to running cultures such as the
Tarahumara people of Mexico; they begin running at a young age, but
they do not walk or crawl especially early. She is now working in
Tajikistan, where babies are bound for most of the day. The practice
delays when they first walk, but her early evidence shows no
differences compared with how Western babies walk by preschool age.
LEARN GRAVITY FIRST
Science-based investigations indicate that parents cannot supercharge
their babies. But that does not mean science has not generated advice
for what babies should play with. Play is incredibly important for
developing minds. Just as food nourishes the body, play promotes
language, cognition, spatial reasoning and other talents in ways
scientists are still trying to understand. And like food, sometimes
the simplest options can be among the best. For instance, blocks and
Legos pop up often in the scientific literature. Kids who build stuff
have better spatial reasoning and, in one controversial study, better
math skills. According to experts, there is nothing magical about
building; children simply benefit from toys such as balls, dump trucks
and ramps that teach them about the physics of gravity, shape and
movement. Watching a baby careen toward the floor or into a closed
door is terrifying, but these are just their physics experiments to
understand how gravity operates and whether two objects can occupy the
same space. Perhaps the most crucial experiments deal with the most
enigmatic of phenomena: time. It turns out that babies do not
understand time any better than they do gravity or inertia. And some
experts worry that if this learning is disrupted, a skewed view can
have long-lasting effects. Dimitri Christakis is a child psychologist
at the University of Washington, who directs a children's center at
Seattle Children's Hospital. He studies the effect of video screen
time on children, which is crucial as children increasingly use
tablets, phones and laptops. He has found that it is not the screen
that causes problems but the pace of the programming on it. Games and
cartoons that speed up the action or quickly switch scenes may affect
a child's "internal metronome," a mechanism that Christakis believes
develops in the first three years to help individuals understand the
pace of the world. If that pace is set too fast, it can lead to
attentional problems—a theory backed by studies in which he has
induced deficits in cognition and attention in mice. Christakis
compares older shows such as Mister Rogers' Neighborhood with modern,
frenetic cartoons or video products for infants such as those put out
in the past by Baby Einstein. He is concerned that not only are TV and
video games faster today but their consumers are younger. Hirsh-Pasek
agrees. Her lab has also shown that no matter how interactive a game
or show seems to be, it is not as beneficial as a live human
being—either in person or via a video phone call. The key for
nutritious play is another human who interacts at a normal pace. Chau,
the LeapFrog director, agrees that videos should not replace human
interaction but says they can be a part of a child's development.
Rather than playing with a real wedge or lever, a baby might do it on
a screen while she is not interacting with real people. But Christakis
worries screens could have lasting detrimental effects. By looking at
how parts of the brain used glutamate, a basic neurotransmitter
involved in learning and memory, he has found connections to cocaine
addiction in his attention-challenged mice. Overstimulation led to
more enjoyment of cocaine, less sensitization to it and ever more
hyperactivity. This is not to say that the same is true in humans or
that overstimulated kids will turn to drugs, but addictions rely on
reward networks in the brain and habit formation. To better understand
these ideas, Christakis is now studying screen addiction in children
as young as two years old. That would have been unheard of a decade
ago, and he says he has found it in almost 10 percent of his subjects.
"My fear is that we are going to see that go up and that we'll see it
start at a younger and younger age as more and more infants and
toddlers spend time" on screens, Christakis says. "These devices have
a lot of addictive features." Hidden danger can lurk behind certain
products, it seems. But even if educational products aimed at babies
may do no harm, there is a dearth of evidence that they convey
benefits in the long term. If you simply must buy some cool toy,
perhaps find one that you want to play with. Because experts agree the
time a baby spends with you—hearing you talk and watching you interact
with the world—is the best education she can get. Which brings us back
to Pollak and Saffran. Standing in front of the teething ring display,
they had to decide whether to try to increase their son's oral motor
development. They burst out laughing and put the ring back. "We went
to the grocery store, and we bought him a package of frozen bagels for
99 cents," Pollak says. "I took one out of the freezer and let him
chomp on that. It numbed his gums a little bit, and he stopped
crying."
M O R E T O E X P L O R E
Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us about Raising Successful
Children. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. American
Psychological Association, 2016. The Gardener and the Carpenter: What
the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship
between Parents and Children. Alison Gopnik. Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2016. Gwen Dewar's blog Parenting for the Science-Minded:
www.parentingscience.com
F R O M O U R A R C H I V E S How Babies Think. Alison Gopnik; July 2010.
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