Back in the late 1990s, an entrepreneur named Julie Aigner-Clark had a billion-dollar brainstorm. She developed a series of DVDs that would make your baby smarter by stimulating her infant brain. “Studies show that if these neurons are not used, they may die,” the first press release warned ominously. “Through exposure to phonemes in seven languages, Baby Einstein contributes to increased brain capacity.”
Anxious parents couldn't get enough of Baby Einstein. Ms. Aigner-Clark sold out to Disney and got rich, and today, baby videos are a multibillion-dollar industry. There's just one catch: They don't make babies smarter. If anything, say critics, they make them dumber. It turns out that babies who've been plunked in front of baby videos for hours at a time have less language development than babies who haven't. Over the years, Disney has toned down claims for its product and is now offering an extended refund period for any parent who's not happy.
“I get annoyed with these witch doctors of child development,” says Gary Walters, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who specializes in parenting and child development. “Some of these neuroscientists have pushed the idea that you can raise superbabies on scanty and really ambiguous evidence.”
It's not only parents who've been pushed. Vast areas of public policy have been shaped by the same dubious claims. Without expert early intervention, we are told, too many of our children will fall behind in the race of life. That's why Ontario's Premier, Dalton McGuinty, has launched an ambitious investment into full-day kindergarten for every child in the province. He wants this to be his greatest legacy. “We give our kids all the opportunities that they need, especially in their early years,” he said. “And that's the strongest guarantor of a strong economy.”
Who could possibly be against more kindergarten? Certainly not me. It will be a boon for working parents, because it's free, and reliable, and good daycare is hard to find. Unlike baby videos, it won't make kids dumber. But whether it will make them smarter, or decrease their risk of dropping out of high school, is quite another matter. Kindergarten does make many kids better-prepared for first grade. But by third grade, there's little to no evidence that all-day K has any lasting impact.
It's no mystery why we're so enchanted with this stuff. “We're in a period of competitive child-rearing,” says Prof. Walters. “Parents think, ‘It's my obligation to prepare this child for the global workplace, and there's so much competition that it's going to be tough.'” Also, parenting is tough. Parents need a break. It's easier to take a guilt-free break (or go to work) if you know you're growing your kid's brain (or sending her to school) while you do.
We also face a formidable social challenge – one with no easy answers. A significant minority of children fail to thrive in school. These are generally not the children of anxious parents who buy Baby Einstein videos. They tend to be children who come from chaotic, poor, single-parent homes with uneducated mothers, and no books. They need special help. But what?
We'd like to believe that neuroscience has the answer. By the 1960s, there was a significant body of research on enriched and impoverished environments. Understimulated rats, for example, fail to thrive. So do severely understimulated kids, like the ones found in Romanian orphanages. It's tempting to conclude that the opposite must also be true – that kids in enriched environments will naturally do better. Then, in the 1990s, a vigorous PR campaign was launched in the United States to promote more early-learning programs for disadvantaged children. This campaign invoked much scientific evidence (not since borne out) to argue that intensive early intervention was the answer.
