Laura Rowley Money & Happiness

In 1997, the year my first child was born, both Time and Newsweek ran bold cover stories on the amazing development of a baby's brain from birth to age three. The stories were inspired by a White House conference on the importance of stimulation in the earliest years of life -- an event aimed at increasing federal support for early child care.

I eagerly pored over both issues, seeking the practical implications of the research. Knowing my daughter was a "sponge" in the earliest years of life, what could I do to give her a neural leg up in that precious zero-to-three window?

TLC for Profit

As Susan Gregory Thomas reports in her new book "Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds," lots of American parents (like me) went shopping.

"The goals of the conference were laudable, but the lasting legacy was the fear that if parents did not adequately stimulate their children by the time they turned three years old, the circuitry of the brain was effectively closed," says Thomas.

Although the conference emphasized that nothing other than ordinary, loving care was needed for cognitive development, the video, educational, and toy industries co-opted the word "stimulation" -- and, as Thomas reports, a $20 billion-dollar business was born. A host of formal toddler classes and companies such as Baby Einstein, Brainy Baby, and Baby Genius rode a profitable wave of parental anxiety.

Bad for Baby

Between 2003 and 2006, Thomas reports, the number of videotapes and DVDs aimed at babies under two on Amazon.com grew from 140 to 750. Sales of so-called "educational" toys rose 50 percent between 2002 and 2003 alone. Even the grandfather of kiddie media -- Sesame Street -- got in on the game with a video series for zero- to two-year-olds called "Sesame Beginnings."

Meanwhile, a growing body of academic research was indicating that television and videos are harmful to children under age two, and the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a strong recommendation that this group not be exposed to such media at all.

Parents think babies are getting something out of "educational" videos because they're riveted by the activity on the screen, says Thomas. But researchers say what's really going on is an "orienting reflex" -- the neural response to new, startling information. It's what happens when you hear a loud noise: The brain scrambles to figure out the cause and location; whether you've experience it before; and whether it requires a flight-or-fight response.

Inhibiting Language Skills

But a baby who's watching a video gets caught in an endless orienting-reflex loop. Thomas cites other studies that have linked early television watching to attention deficit disorder -- even autism.

A study published this month in the Journal of Pediatrics found that DVD watching by children age 8 to 16 months hinders language development.

For every hour a day spent watching baby videos, infants in that age range understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who didn't watch them. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood coalition filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over DVDs marketed to babies.

An Expensive Waste of Time

Thomas suggests marketers play to the insecurities of Generation X -- latchkey kids with divorced parents, raised on lame after-school television designed to push toys (think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles).

"Once this generation came into its own as parents, marketers noticed two things: They have a deep and abiding fear of abandonment that they transfer on to their children, and they were comfortable with television as a babysitter," says Thomas. "Toy and video companies needed to convince Generation X mothers that their products would basically be maternal surrogates in their absence -- providing the same kind of value and nurturing and care."

Although I'm part of Generation X, I wasn't a latchkey child; in fact, my dad died a week before my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. Still, I carted my oldest daughter to music class at nine months and French at age two-and-a-half.

By the time I had my third child, however, I realized that formal toddler classes were largely a waste of time, and the money for them was better invested in a 529 college savings plan. My youngest got just as much out of informal playgroups and unstructured time in the park, and she preferred the basics -- blocks and balls -- to talking gizmos with candy-colored lights.

Branding Starts Early

Among the most intriguing research cited in the book is a study conducted by Dan Anderson of the University of Massachusetts, with groups of children watching "Teletubbies." Anderson cut the program into nonsensical segments and, in a separate experiment, ran the soundtrack backwards. The 2-year-olds were distracted by the mixed-up shows -- they knew something was wrong -- while children younger than 24 months were oblivious to the changes.

But babies of all ages who watched the video excelled at one skill: character recognition. Although the story was meaningless to the youngest, they could still identify the characters Lala and Po. And as Thomas points out, "the only other scenario in which children encounter these characters are ones in which the characters are selling them something. This is their first introduction to branding."

According to a 2003 study, two-thirds of mothers reported that their toddlers asked for specific brands before the age of three.

Materialism Triumphant?

So what's the harm? I expect when I buy my four-year-old new sneakers, she'll undoubtedly zero in on anything featuring Dora the Explorer. And in a year, she'll think Dora is for babies and move on to something else.

Thomas worries that, at least on a philosophical and psychological level, something darker is going on -- a triumph of material lifestyle over deeper values.

"When there's an attachment [to a brand] ingrained from a young age, you can't separate that from a feeling of happiness and love," she argues. "We're creating a nation of impulse buyers -- we don't think about what it is we're buying, we just know we need to buy more. My generation feels more kinship with the person who also bought a Volkswagen Touareg than how he voted in the last election."

Wider Response Required

Thomas argues that more research is needed on the impact of media on children ages zero to three, as well as greater restrictions on advertising to children. She also advocates paid child leave, so that parents can spend more time with their babies. (The United States is the only industrialized country that provides no paid child leave; 163 countries give mothers paid leave on the birth of their children, and 45 countries offer it to fathers.)

"All of the experts with whom I spoke said the best possible thing you can do is just hang out and enjoy being with your child," Thomas says. "You need to have time, and time is the one thing we as Americans don't have. So in addition to personal response -- turning off the television and deciding not to do that class -- there needs to be a political response."