Read the book: «Buy, Buy Baby: How Big Business Captures the Ultimate Consumer – Your Baby or Toddler»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

1. Learn Something New Every Day

2. “There’s a New Mom in Town”

3. “It’s Like Preschool on TV”

4. A Vast and Uncontrolled Experiment

5. Elmo’s World

6. The Princess Lifestyle

7. Anything to Get Them to Read

8. Developing Character in Preschool

Conclusion: A Defense of “Nothing”

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Copyright

About the Publisher

Epigraph

Everyone [in America] is in motion, some in quest of power, others of gain. In the midst of this universal tumult, this incessant conflict of jarring interests, this continual striving of men after fortune, where is that calm to be found which is necessary for the deeper combinations of the intellect?

— ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America

Introduction

IT IS A MIDSUMMER DAY, about one o’clock, at the midtown Manhattan power-lunch landmark Oceana. The dining room conveys the quiet, streamlined elegance of a stateroom on a luxury liner, the ideal backdrop for the muted, intent conversations that typically take place here. It is not unusual to spend upward of one hundred dollars per person for lunch at Oceana, but the typical guest does not pay out of her own pocket for meals here. This is a place where executives capitalize on their corporate tabs to lay the unofficial foundations for deals that will be inked in boardrooms later. On this particular day, a man who is one of the premier kids’ marketers in the United States is perusing the restaurant’s tasting menu. An executive who has been in the field for more than twenty years and done business with Mattel, Hasbro, and Procter & Gamble, he clearly finds this a comfortable milieu; indeed, it is one of his favorite lunch haunts.

For the purposes of my conversation with him, he does not want his name divulged. If the details of what he is about to discuss were attributed to him in print, he chuckles, he “would most likely end up being forced to testify about them in a Senate subcommittee.” His tone is calculatedly offhand, but he is serious about the inflammatory nature of the issue on the table. He is here to discuss how marketers target babies and toddlers as customers. It is, he admits, very controversial to market to such a young group, and most marketers and advertising agencies will tell you they don’t do it. But don’t believe them, he says: they do.

The executive tells me that the moment a baby can see clearly, she becomes a consumer. What he calls the “mini-me” phenomenon encourages children to be brand sensitive at an early age. Today’s infants are crawling and toddling billboards for America’s big brand names, he says, citing the successful business strategies of the Gap and Nike to expand their adult apparel lines to hip clothing for babies and toddlers. Furthermore, he says, all developmental milestones of early life are punctuated by brand names. Babies don’t travel in plain old strollers; they ride in Maclarens, Graycos, or high-end Bugaboos. Their car seats have Eddie Bauer labels. Their nipples are Nuks, their bottles are Playtex or Avent. Their diapers are Huggies with Disney’s Winnie the Pooh or Pampers with Sesame Street characters. He maintains that as soon as a baby or toddler points to McDonald’s Golden Arches, the “brand request” is born: words aren’t required. Even supermarket managers are becoming aware of toddlers’ influence as consumers. At many chains, products for toddlers are placed at their eye level; the child simply grabs the box and hands it to mom, who drops it into the shopping cart.

The kids’ marketing consultant points out that today’s babies and toddlers spend more time in preschool or daycare than they ever have in the past, either because their upper-middle-class parents worry about “socializing” an only child or because both have jobs. The result, from a marketer’s point of view, is that even a toddler is developing a public persona. Peer pressure, a prime medium for marketing to children, starts earlier than ever. But if the executive were forced to name the single most powerful force in targeting toddlers as a market? Easy, he says: television. Sesame Street may have started the revolution in what he calls “toddler TV,” but that show is scrambling to keep its place now. In fact, toddler television has made it possible to calibrate market segments to one-year intervals. It’s Teletubbies for one-year-olds, Blue’s Clues for twos, Barney for threes. If you talk about marketing to babies or toddlers, you are “seen as evil,” he says, but so-called educational television for little children wears what he calls an “acceptability halo.” A marketer who establishes “educational credit” can get away with anything.

THE BIRTH OF A BABY CULTURE

In the majority of American households with children between the ages of zero and three years old, popping in a baby video or flicking on the TV set to a preschool program is as mundane a routine as tooth brushing or bath time. It is not so much a parenting decision as a national reflex. Such videos and TV programs are marketed as educational for babies and toddlers, and it is generally accepted that on some level they are educational. Noggin, a cable channel for preschoolers, touts its tag line: “It’s Like Preschool on TV.” There’s little reason to question that claim. The channel was started as a joint venture of Nickelodeon and Sesame Workshop, both trustworthy institutions. Many preschoolers have mastered mousing skills by their second birthday, and the Web sites of their favorite shows have games and activities for toddlers. The term “preschooler” is understood by many sources, including the Nielsen ratings, to refer to two- to five-year-olds; some include eighteen-month-olds in that category.

Elitists may find it tacky, but few Americans — and not just parents of very young children — register it as unusual that at chain bookstores, discount behemoths such as Wal-Mart, and libraries, many of the most popular books for infants and toddlers are based on licensed television characters or snack foods, such as General Mills’ Cheerios or Pepperidge Farm’s Goldfish. Few eyebrows are raised when daycare chains and even pre-K programs adopt curricula based on TV characters, with their licensed cartoon likenesses emblazoned on posters, books, videos, take-home handouts, coloring books, and other materials marketed as educational. Many of these programs are produced in collaboration with Scholastic, a company whose reputation is synonymous with education. There is little reason to question the claims by makers of baby toys and equipment that their products “stimulate” babies’ cognitive abilities with blinking lights or classical music. The packaging explains why such features are educational, and parents are sure that they read or saw something that an expert said about them. In any case, most people buy these products because that’s what is on the market.

The world of infants and toddlers did not look like this even fifteen years ago. Babies and toddlers were generally used by the media only as stars in daytime television commercials. (Enter the wobbly tot, lurching around the house as a frazzled mother follows with a roll of paper towels and a happy, defeated smile for her irresistible little monster.) Mothers were the target consumers. Very young children were simply considered too young to grasp basic advertising pitches; moreover, the industry generally viewed pushing products on little children as unethical. But much has changed in a very short time. Until very recently, for example, “preschooler” referred to four- and five-year-olds; those younger than three were considered babies or toddlers. Today the “zero-to-three” market has become the first segment in “cradle-to-grave” marketing, representing more than $20 billion a year. Selling to this age group is a rapidly growing industry manned by a battalion of specialized and sophisticated advertising firms; child psychology researchers, often funded by companies interested in building a consumer base of very young children; and cross-marketing campaigns that deliberately intertwine educational messages with subtle commercial ploys. As the zero-to-three market has grown, so has a popular culture revolving around babies and toddlers. It includes formal classes and school (gymnastics, music, art, academics), the use of machines previously reserved for adults and older kids (computers, VCRs, TV, DVRs, cell phones, digital cameras), and rigorous schedules to ensure that every moment offers an opportunity to “learn.”

The emergence of the zero-to-three market has, both directly and indirectly, compelled the toy, food, and apparel industries, as well as every major media conglomerate, to reconfigure their long-term marketing strategies. Brand recognition starts much earlier than one might think. Marketing studies show that children can discern brands as early as eighteen months; by twenty-four months they ask for products by brand name. In fact, a study conducted in 2000 found that brands wield as much influence on two-year-olds as they used to on children of five and up. Nearly two-thirds of the mothers interviewed for the study reported that their children asked for specific brands before the age of three, while one-third said their kids were aware of brands at age two or earlier. Brands that kids knew best included Cheerios, Disney, McDonald’s, Pop-Tarts, Coke, and Barbie.

The phenomenon of cradle-to-grave marketing can, in some ways, be seen as the ultimate, inevitable step in the phenomenon that kids’ marketers have long referred to as KGOY: Kids Getting Older Younger. Since the 1980s, marketers have been refining ways of mining the ’tween market: children between the ages of six and eleven. This age group has always been brand-conscious, but as one longtime marketer put it, “It’s dribbled down” to even younger children. But how has this happened, and why?

NO SPECIAL TALENTS

In the late 1990s, a New York Times Magazine feature article titled “Test-Tube Moms” marveled at what had become “a neurotic national pastime”: “raising a scientifically correct child.” If any one event triggered this neurosis, it was the Clintons’ 1997 White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning, later famously referred to as the “brain conference.” With the goal of impressing on both Congress and the public the importance of funding early-child-care programs, the conference called on neurobiologists and experts in the field of early childhood development to explain how the brain grows during the first three years of life. Presenters emphasized that the brain develops more rapidly, and makes more significant connections, in these years than it ever will again. A massive public relations campaign bolstered by celebrities, most notably Rob Reiner, echoed the importance of the years from zero to three, and the campaign was publicized by all the major press outlets.

Within a month of the conference, the Baby Einstein Company was founded by Julie Aigner-Clark, a stay-at-home mother of a toddler. Aigner-Clark launched an educational video series for babies with $18,000 of her own savings, seed money for a business that she, having paid attention to timing and cultural trends, had good reason to believe would take off. Aigner-Clark saw that Baby Boomers were having their first children later and were applying the well-known yuppie drive to baby-rearing. Products that promised to stimulate early literacy — such as giant earphones designed to straddle pregnant bellies — had been hot for a few years. Generation-X women were now starting to have babies, too, and were bringing some of their technology know-how to lap time, spawning a new category of software for babies called lapware. Also, they had grown up watching Sesame Street and were comfortable using television as a babysitter. The Mozart Effect, though ultimately debunked, was more or less accepted as fact in the popular culture. Of course, Aigner-Clark knew about the brain conference. She also noted that for this generation of new mothers, taking a shower or making a grilled cheese sandwich had become a high-stakes proposition. The new mom felt it was not an option to leave her baby in his cradle while she bathed or prepared a meal; the baby required stimulation, entertainment, or soothing.

Aigner-Clark tapped a real gold vein with the title of her company. Although she would later insist that she “honestly had no idea what a great marketing name it was,” Baby Einstein is widely regarded as one of the most ingenious product names in marketing history. It was inspired, Aigner-Clark says, by a remark attributed to Albert Einstein: “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” Highlighting babies’ natural passionate curiosity, the company’s publicity materials and public statements insist that its products are not genius-makers but are grounded solely in the principle that “every moment of every day in these early years is an opportunity for discovery.” But it is clear that the reason the company name has worked so well is that Einstein is famous for his genius as a scientist, not for his emotional temperament. Similarly, the other historical namesakes in the Baby Einstein pantheon — Babies Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Van Gogh, Shakespeare, Galileo, da Vinci, and Newton — are creative geniuses. The obvious genius of the company name is the power of its suggestion: parents implicitly understand the insinuation that their babies can be made smarter or more creative by watching these videos.

It is not surprising that Aigner-Clark had a hit on her hands. She could have walked away after a year or so with a profit of well over six figures and the satisfaction of achieving the postfeminist All by making a bundle from a fulfilling, home-based business. But her timing was more than good. In just five years, she sold the Baby Einstein Company to the Walt Disney Company for an estimated $25 million. Aigner-Clark nailed the Zeitgeist completely.

Some people in kids’ marketing suggest that Aigner-Clark played the wholesome milkmaid for effect. She knew she had a cash cow, and she milked it dry. If this is true, her act is almost scandalously good. But she does not seem like a steamroller executive, nor is she unsophisticated — she’s smart and savvy. Moreover, she seems genuinely nice (though she works at home, she frets that she sees even less of her children than if she worked outside because she is compulsively drawn to her office). There is nothing out of the ordinary in this. In fact, her whole comportment seems utterly ordinary — which, in a sense, makes it still stranger. One has the impression, in talking with her, that she feels like Luke Skywalker after the fluky, fateful pull of the trigger that detonated the Death Star’s central nerve: How did I do it? Did I do it, or was the Force with me? A hint of supernatural awe crept into the title of a speech Aigner-Clark gave at a marketing conference in a recent year: “Can Lightning Strike Twice? The Personal Quest to Find a Sequel to Baby Einstein.” The title was poignant. It suggests that she credits fate for the success of her product rather than herself. She had, without a doubt, deliberately walked out into the field on a rainy day, but she hadn’t known that the weather patterns that afternoon would make it the rainy day. Furthermore, finding a sequel to Baby Einstein misses the point. Its impact has been so profound that it is hard to discern where the product ends and the culture of early childhood in America now begins.

ALLEGIANCE TO A BRAND

Baby Einstein and the raft of imitators it spawned helped transform the culture by addressing a seemingly simple issue. As People magazine wrote in 2000, in a piece marveling at the self-made millionaire mom, “It’s one of life’s great mysteries: How did parents of toddlers eat dinner in peace before videos? Julie Aigner-Clark, thirty-three, founder of the Baby Einstein Company, can’t answer that — but she has helped moms and dads feel less guilty about their VCR habit.” It is remarkable to think of it today, but Aigner-Clark was the first person to broker the merger of what now seem like two relatively obvious ideas: that a video or TV program can be a good baby toy and that a well-designed toy might boost a baby’s brain power. In a decade, this convergence has, perhaps permanently, transformed the everyday experiences of all but the most insulated American children between the ages of zero and three.

This merger has caused a major shift in the child-rearing style and core beliefs of the majority of American parents, cutting across social and economic boundaries. It is not just that more babies and toddlers watch TV, videos, and DVDs, though they certainly do. It is estimated that nearly 30 percent of American homes in which young children live own a Baby Einstein video. According to Disney market research, Baby Einstein has 82 percent brand awareness. Three out of four pregnant women say they are “likely to buy Baby Einstein products.” In a groundbreaking 2003 study of the media habits of America’s children under six, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reported that more than half of the parents surveyed believed that educational TV and baby videos such as those produced by Baby Einstein were “very important” to their babies’ intellectual development. President George W. Bush underscored this widely held conviction in his 2007 State of the Union address, commending Aigner-Clark for “represent[ing] the great enterprising spirit of America.” Perhaps because of the belief that a video can raise their babies’ IQ, or can at least be “educational,” more than a quarter of American children under the age of two have a television in their room, in spite of an appeal by the American Academy of Pediatrics that children under two not watch television at all. On a typical day, 61 percent of children six months to twenty-three months watch television; by age three, 88 percent do. The median time that children from zero to three spend watching some form of media on the screen is slightly under two hours — about as much time as they spend playing outside and about three times as much time as they spend being read to.

What might be called the baby genius phenomenon — the widely held notion that infants and toddlers can be made smarter via exposure to the right products and programs — has spread throughout the toy industry. Today, to be competitive in the baby and toddler business, a toymaker’s products must encourage “learning,” or at least claim that they do. The fastest-growing segment of the $3.2 billion infant and preschool toy business is represented by “educational” products, which are advertised as stimulating babies’ and toddlers’ cognitive abilities. Indeed, the demand for such playthings has completely transformed the toy industry. It has helped catapult dot-com-era start-ups such as LeapFrog into the major leagues and drastically shifted the business strategies of longtime players such as Mattel’s Fisher-Price and Hasbro’s PlaySkool. Wholesale buyers, who follow no educational guidelines in their decisions, are governed only by how they believe customers will respond to packaging claims. It is now standard for anyone marketing to very young children and their families to make certain that his product — and brand — wears what the kids’ marketing executive called an educational “halo.” As he said at Oceana, if you can get educational credit, you can pretty much get away with anything.

The end game is getting a customer. Just two years after Baby Einstein’s launch, network and cable television began to produce shows for toddlers because they saw a chance to hook kids to their channels early on. Asked why so many cable channels were diving into the preschool market, Nick Jr.’s top executive, Brown Johnson, said, “It’s about building allegiance to a brand.”

KGOY

This book looks at the development of what has become the youngest segment in American youth culture. This is not a culture, clearly, that babies and toddlers invented, but rather one constructed by parents, child-care providers, television, and marketers. The effects of this culture on young children are surprising, sometimes shocking, and profound — though academic and marketing researchers alike are only beginning to understand just how deeply the effects run, or even precisely what they are. They are rarely what they seem. To some extent, this is an examination of what marketers call “age compression” or KGOY. Although the nuances are slightly different — the first implies that adults apply the force, the second shrugs that kids getting older younger is an inevitable consequence of living in our times — they both refer to the fact that today’s grade-school children are dealt with the way teenagers were ten or more years ago, and so on down the age scale. Both phenomena, which date back at least to the 1920s in the United States, have been consciously manufactured and maintained by marketers. Since the beginnings of what is generally considered the American youth culture — that point where the media and children’s public lives intersect — KGOY has been a source of parental alarm as well as a business opportunity. Parents have always rebelled against the commercialization of their children initially, but over time they, the children, and, ultimately, American society, internalize the new standard of KGOY as the social norm. Anyone on its periphery is considered quaint, odd, or rigid. KGOY is the ever-changing heart of American youth culture.

KGOY takes on a different meaning when applied to babies, however. Whereas even slightly older children may not feel as old as they act, or are called on to act by a variety of forces, all but the most cloistered have some cultural frame of reference for what the KGOY performance might look like. Babies and toddlers do not. Babies and toddlers are not little kids; they do not think like little kids. The developmental gap between an eighteen-month-old and a four-year-old is as wide a gap as exists in human development; indeed, a teenage girl has more in common, cognitively speaking, with an elderly man than a toddler does with a four-year-old. Babies and toddlers have no prior experience of the world; as the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget first showed in the 1920s, the picture of the world they are working to assemble is categorically different from older children’s, and certainly from adults’. As research is showing, babies and toddlers are astonishingly concrete thinkers. What they may seem to be learning from the stimuli and experiences they encounter in the new baby culture is very different from what they are actually learning.

This book also looks at the important social and historical forces that converged to create the new baby culture. The rise of the child-rearing expert in the United States, the “professionalizing” of motherhood, drastic changes in material culture and work-family patterns in the 1970s, and the vastly different childhoods and parenting styles of Baby Boomers and Generation Xers have all contributed to the formation of today’s zero-to-three market. Toddler TV may have been the tipping point, but momentum had been building for as long as a century.

PROBLEM-SOLVING DEFICIT DISORDER

Still, in the past decade something unique, and uniquely concerning, has been unfolding with the past decade’s development of a baby and toddler market. For one, the long-term impact of the baby genius phenomenon may be anything but educational. Many in the field of early child development suspect that babies and toddlers reared on TV, videos, and blinking, beeping “smart” toys may ultimately suffer from cognitive problems. Diane E. Levin, a professor in the early childhood education department at Wheelock College in Boston, calls the phenomenon “problem-solving deficit disorder.” Levin contends that such products essentially overstimulate very young children, so that instead of using their own resources to solve a problem or an uncomfortable feeling — Mom is in the shower, boredom, and so on — they apply those resources to processing the dazzling object that has been placed before them. Over time, Levin says, babies and toddlers accustomed to getting this kind of sensory “hit” when they feel uncomfortable may not just become dependent on having that hit but may even lose the ability to work through feelings and ideas independently or with the help of a trusted friend. Marie Anzalone, who is on the faculty of Columbia University’s occupational therapy program, reports that she frequently treats very young children from low-income as well as upper-middle-class families who appear glazed over and numb, which she believes is an ingrained response to overstimulation from technology toys and television. These toddlers simply cannot integrate the sensory overload to which they are routinely subjected; to cope, they begin to tune out.

Constant distractions are known to impair children’s cognitive development in other ways, too. A University of Massachusetts study conducted by the preeminent academic researcher Daniel R. Anderson on the effects of television on young children showed that even the seemingly benign practice of keeping the television running in the background at home can be disastrous for toddlers’ development because it interferes with their ability to concentrate on their own activities. The study reported that one-year-olds’ focused play is reduced by half when the television is on, even if the children are not specifically tuning in to the programming. Focused play — which, as the celebrated preschool pioneer Maria Montessori pointed out, is the work of childhood — is essential for normal cognitive development. In other words, it is essential for little brains to grow.

INCREASED DEPRESSION

The baby genius phenomenon has paved the way for the commercialization of early childhood, and that has raised the stakes higher still. In 2004 the American Psychological Association strongly recommended that advertising and marketing to children under the age of eight be restricted. The reason for the organization’s admonition was that children in that age group do not understand persuasion. They may recognize that an ad looks different from a television show or a magazine article, but they do not grasp its intent to persuade an audience to buy something. They don’t understand that what the ad suggests may not be entirely true or that the product depicted in an advertisement may not look the way it is presented. Their capacity to think abstractly on this level has nothing to do with intelligence; it is indicative of a developmental milestone corresponding with age level. If a seven-year-old cannot understand that SpongeBob is there to sell her junk food, how can a baby understand this? What are the long-term effects of being raised in such a marketing culture, not only to one’s mind but to one’s sense of self and spirit?

It is clear to see how these effects are manifested as children grow older. In her extensive study of Boston-area children between the ages of ten and thirteen, Juliet B. Schor, a sociologist and the author of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, sought to determine whether involvement in consumer culture had any effect on children’s general well-being. Over a period of three years, Schor and her team of graduate students administered a questionnaire consisting of more than 150 questions covering media use, consumer values and involvement in consumer culture, relationships with parents, demographic variables, and measures of physical and mental well-being. Defining “consumer involvement” on a spectrum of identifiers ranging from “I feel like other kids have more stuff than I do” and “I care a lot about my games, toys, and other possessions” to “I like watching commercials,” the study’s results were striking. Regardless of the participants’ socioeconomic, educational, or cultural background, Schor found that “high consumer involvement is a significant cause of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and psychosomatic complaints.” She also found a clear causal and reflexive relationship between consumer involvement and health: “Less involvement in consumer culture leads to healthier kids, and more involvement leads kids’ psychological well-being to deteriorate.” Finally, “Higher levels of consumer involvement result in worse relationships with parents, which also leads to increased depression, anxiety, lower self-esteem and more psychosomatic complaints.”

THE INFLUENCE OF MARKETING

My research for this book began in the mid-1990s, when I was a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report. At that newsweekly, many of the editors in title are reporters in fact, and it was my job to cover technology as it related to consumers as well as business.

In 1997 I started to get calls from consumer software companies wanting to set up press appointments to demonstrate what they were calling “lapware” — educational software for infants and toddlers, who would sit on a parent’s lap while they used the software. The lapware that most companies showed me seemed to be digital versions of cause-and-effect toys. Instead of twisting a plastic key to release a pop-up plastic animal, infants would bang on the keyboard for the reward of seeing stars and shapes sparkling across the monitor. The lapware for toddlers — largely aimed at children between the ages of two and five — was more overtly academic. It was easy for parents to assume that software with titles such as JumpStart and Reader Rabbit was “educational,” and what’s more, it seemed to provide an important computer experience. According to the software firms, new scientific research on the brain had shown that a person never learns more than in the first three years of life; after that the window closes, and opportunities to grow new neurons and build the foundation for future brain power are lost. As the White House Conference had shown, they argued, failure to stimulate a growing brain could have serious consequences down the line.

At that point in technology history, computers enjoyed a virtually unimpeachable reputation as educational instruments. The overwhelming sentiment at the time was that by using computers even for the most mundane tasks, children were not only learning a particular skill but were also becoming smarter in the process. A great many people, of great social and economic influence, seemed to believe that “kids today” were smarter because they could do things like insert a CD-ROM into the appropriate disk drive and build Web sites using HTML software. But the archaeological and anthropological record shows that children have always begun using the predominant tools of their culture at around four or five years old. Kids were no more sophisticated for using computers in Newton, Massachusetts, in the mid-nineties than for learning how to use bows and arrows in the prehistoric Lenape nation. The real change, it seemed, was the influence of marketing: people believed it.

That was certainly true for the technology industry as a whole. Ingenious marketing and public relations campaigns could take a great deal of the credit for the heady success of the tech economy of the nineties. I was especially impressed by the Palm marketing team, which did a phenomenal job of convincing not just harried dot-com CEOs but everyone else who had relied on paper datebooks that they would not be able to get organized without a hundred-dollar hand-held digital gizmo. It was common knowledge that Microsoft and Intel kept upping the ante with new versions of Windows that demanded ever-faster processors; then PR departments helped drive the fear of becoming obsolete, which accelerated the upgrade cycle. Internet providers fed concerns that if you didn’t have a Web site, you would be denied access to the digital age.

But while PR and marketing firms may have boosted unit sales, they were not entirely responsible for a massive change in cultural sensibility. The Web itself was doing that. It is easy to forget that until the mid-nineties, e-mail was still a clunky mode of communication employed mostly by techies and academics. Most other e-mail correspondence was restricted to private systems, such as internal corporate networks. The Web changed all that. When the Web took off, so did viruses — and not just hard-disk-munching e-bugs. Viral behavior itself seemed to find parallels in the world the Web had wrought. In his provocative treatise Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, Douglas Rushkoff argued that ideas and trends were not just taking on viruslike qualities of replication, dissemination, and adaptation. They were viruses. Just as a biological virus that causes the common cold or AIDS attaches itself to a healthy host cell with a sticky protein shell, a media virus first hooks into a person’s mind via a titillating news event, scientific theory, or new technology. Then, just as a biological virus injects its own genetic code to turn healthy cells into virus-replicating machines, a media virus infects thoughts with ideological code: “Like real genetic material, these [ideological codes] infiltrate the way we do business, educate ourselves, interact with one another — even the way we perceive reality.” In both cases, the weaker the host, the more susceptible to viral infiltration. Soon Rushkoff’s book became required reading at major marketing firms; Rushkoff himself became one of the hottest speakers on the business conference circuit. Marketers around the country wanted to learn how to unleash their own media viruses.

THE BABY GENIUS VIRUS

With the emergence of lapware, a new media virus seemed to be taking form: a baby genius virus with several major components. One was the notion that “technology makes you smarter and better.” While the fertile conditions of the dot-com era fostered a particularly virulent strain in the nineties, that sentiment had been around for a long time.

Historians have pointed out that America’s confidence in technological progress is probably as old as the nation itself. The ingenuity of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and many other iconic figures in American history has always been touted and mythologized. In his prescient nineteenth-century work Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on Americans’ “addiction” to the uses of “practical science.” Confidence in technology has become inextricably linked with many of the traits we associate with the American character: the pioneering ethic, self-reliance, self-improvement, reinvention, pragmatism, and optimism. The faith that the correct application of science and technology can somehow transmit such values is central to the American outlook. From the Eisenhower-era film loops featuring the can-do star Our Friend the Atom to the Reagan administration’s deep faith in the Star Wars defense system to Silicon Valley’s conviction that the Internet-driven “New Economy” would coincide with the new millennium, the promise that technology would bring about a brighter tomorrow has inspired Americans even as it has disappointed them.

Such pitches and promises are key to our consumer economy, too. Most advertising campaigns rely on targeting the “aspirational,” often the spark of hope ignited when we learn of the amazing “technology,” “advance,” or “breakthrough” embedded in the new car, computer, phone, face cream, razor blade, dishwashing soap, saucepan, or coffee maker. Such commercials work because, however embarrassingly or unconsciously, we have internalized the suggestion that this new technology is the conduit for self-improvement, reinvention, optimism — manifest destiny itself. We want to believe.

The other major component of the baby genius virus, the emphasis on the profound importance of the first three years of life, was propelled by the Carnegie Foundation’s report and the White House brain conference. Although the conference organizers intended to convey the necessity of government-funded, standards-based child care for infants and toddlers, the event’s lasting legacy was a resurgence of the national preoccupation with raising babies the right way. These two forces united to produce an extremely potent germ. Because online communities of mothers were growing exponentially — and Gen-Xers relied on them for information as well as moral support — the baby genius virus began to multiply like crazy. If it is true that our American consumer economy takes our concerns, commodifies them, and sells them back to us (a notion attributable, I believe, to Noam Chomsky), then the baby genius zeitgeist was clearly a case in point. The brain conference raised concerns about the importance of babies’ first three years, which was being sold back to parents in the form of brain “stimulators” such as lapware, baby videos, “learning” toys, and so on. What was most remarkable about the baby genius media virus was that, like the flu, it infected everyone. It started in a population of upper-middle-class parents on the East and West Coasts, but over the next several years it spread across the country and across ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Also remarkable was how little resistance there was to the idea. There was no evidence that any of these products was any more educationally stimulating than shaking a rattle, playing with blocks, mucking around in the backyard, or just hanging out, playing with a beloved caregiver or parent. Indeed, there were no studies available on how babies and toddlers even processed screened media or electronic toys. There was no reason to believe any of it.

PERSONAL CONVERSATIONS

In 1999 I began reporting on online privacy. At the time the two biggest concerns were the possibilities that hackers would tunnel into people’s hard disks and steal their financial information and that pedophiles would lure children into lurid conversations by pretending to be children themselves. But during my work on this beat, I learned about another worrisome practice that was far more widespread: marketers using children’s personal information to target them as customers. I had been covering the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines for the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, which required commercial Web sites targeted at anyone younger than thirteen to take certain steps to maintain children’s privacy online. The steps outlined were pretty flimsy. For example, the FTC required sites to state clearly to users that they were collecting personal data and to declare how they were planning to use it; sites were supposed to get verifiable parental consent before collecting and using that information and to allow parents to screen their children’s personal information and stop marketers from using it again. However, it was easy for children to duck such hurdles; any kid old enough to type competently could forge the consent forms. Furthermore, while the guidelines emphasized children’s safety, they did nothing to protect children from marketers. Sites were not required to get parental permission before collecting children’s e-mail addresses or names if they were procured in response to kids’ e-mails or to contest entries or e-newsletter subscriptions.

What alarmed critics was the ability of marketers to use “spokes-characters” to develop personalized relationships with children. The Center for Media Education feared that sites with branded characters could conduct ongoing “personal” conversations with young children through e-mail or personalized Web sites. And through the use of basic tracking software, sites could register each child’s online footprint and use a simple algorithm to determine his habits, fears, likes, and tastes; such techniques were already widely used in targeting adult customers. An automatic program could then produce irresistible messages tailor-made for each child. Child development professionals, such as Michael Brody of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, were concerned that young children’s emotional investment in cartoon spokescharacters would make them especially vulnerable to these intimate marketing messages. Such figures were celebrities to children, Brody said, and could have a powerful psychological impact.

As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argued in his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, it is through iconic fairy tales that young children unwittingly explore their unconscious fears of abandonment or the death of a parent; such narratives help children process these abiding fears without talking about them directly, which would be overwhelming — and, developmentally, almost impossible. Turning fairy tale characters into corporate spokespeople robs children of a vital part of their inner lives, of a rite of passage fundamental to human development. It has been proven that children under the age of eight are not cognitively able to understand persuasion, even in the blatant form of a TV ad. This kind of personalized character marketing is far more subtle and insidious than a TV ad. Brody said bluntly, “Marketers have become child experts, just like pedophiles.”

BEHIND THAT FRIENDLY, FURRY FACE

By the time I was pregnant with my first child in 2000, baby genius tech toys had come to dominate the market. Now especially curious about the efficacy of such products, I wrote a story about “smart” toys, trying to assess the value of such gizmos as the Babbler, an electronic plush baby toy that spoke in Japanese, French, and Spanish phonemes when babies whacked it, and VTech’s Muzzart, a cuddly dog that played tinny Mozart. For the story, I had interviewed a broad range of child development experts, including Jerome and Dorothy Singer at Yale’s Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy and Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. Along with her colleagues Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl at the University of Washington, Gopnik wrote The Scientist in the Crib, a fascinating look at the newest research on how babies learn. Every one of the experts I consulted said that such toys offered no special advantage. They were products of marketing, not research.

By the time my child was born, shows such as Blue’s Clues, Dora the Explorer, and Clifford the Big Red Dog ruled the preschool airwaves, and the starring characters were licensed everywhere. Baby Einstein videos had become some of the most popular baby shower gifts in the country. As I, along with all the other new moms in my New York neighborhood, struggled into our new parental skin, I noticed that many were turning on these shows or videos of the baby-genius variety for their babies and toddlers. The general response in my urban, liberal, educated group seemed to be: “I don’t know if it’s going to make my baby into a genius, but he loves it, and it lets me take a shower.” The consensus was that it couldn’t hurt: we were all raised on TV, after all, and we didn’t turn out to be completely brain-dead. Many of the parents were uncertain that the Baby Einstein–type videos really would help stimulate their babies’ budding neurons. But if there really was something magic in them, how could we not show it to them?

You might think that because I had already done a fair amount of reporting in this area and interviewed experts at the top of this field I would be immune to such questions. You would be wrong. I was freaking out. Maybe those experts were just cynical academics, elitists who would rave about the virtues of wooden blocks until your eyes rolled. Maybe, in spite of my years covering technology, I was finally becoming a Luddite myself. And maybe it was better to let young children share the culture of their peers so they wouldn’t feel like hothouse orchids: pure and precious, unable to survive outside a rarefied environment. Finally, maybe mother really did know best. Maybe moms could sense something in their own children’s responses that no research psychologist would ever be able to tease out or interpret properly. That is, maybe Julie Aigner-Clark’s maternal instincts were better qualifications for grasping the infant mind than all those people with Ph.D.’s in child psychology.

But my background as a technology journalist seems to have saddled me with the curse and gift of extreme suspicion of marketing comeons. Having learned over the years that most marketing and PR campaigns are based on a lot of illusory fluff — and knowing what a sham lapware was — I couldn’t help wondering if the wool was being pulled over our newly maternal eyes with this stuff, too. Also, my memory was that television had generally been the purview of older kids, starting at around four. What, exactly, was the effect of toddler television and babies’ videos on the really little watchers?

But it wasn’t until my seventeen-month-old toddler first saw an Elmo video and within minutes memorized the “Elmo’s World” theme song and within days spotted Elmo on every licensed packaged product we encountered in the supermarket, bookstore, toy store, and library — and begun referring to these Elmo products as “Elmo diapers” or “Elmo books” — that I knew there was definitely something behind that friendly, furry face. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt it was worth looking into. This book is a report of what I found.

1
Learn Something New Every Day

IT IS MARCH 2004, around nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning in the Bay Area’s industrial-chic city of Emeryville, California. Although Beth, a producer at the technology toy company LeapFrog, is in the final stage of pregnancy — the bulky, drowsy stage — she is sharp and energetic as she discusses the features of a new toy prototype. Beth is one of the top producers in the LeapFrog Baby division, launched in 2004, and all eyes — both internally and in the business world at large — are watching closely. As with its products for older children, LeapFrog must protect its brand integrity by ensuring that its toys for infants and toddlers are designed for optimal learning. The prototype Beth is describing is an interactive plush frog that she and her team have been working on for several months. Some people who work here say that you can feel a high-pitched vibration in the air when a new product presentation is in progress. Then again, you can sense that vibe just about anytime at LeapFrog.

Walk by any cubicle in LeapFrog’s loftlike headquarters, and you see casually dressed product designers and producers gripping oversize stainless steel coffee mugs as they discuss a current project or weigh in with verve on someone else’s. Whiteboards are inscribed with diagrams and flow charts. There is something of a time-capsule feeling at LeapFrog, as if all the creative, manic, Ivy League energy that was evenly distributed throughout the Bay Area during the e-business era of the 1990s were preserved in these offices. Then that energy was largely directed at convincing Wall Street that Web-based business-to-business (B2B) companies would be the pillars of the New Economy. Now, at LeapFrog, it is aimed at making toys that enhance children’s cognitive development, or, as the company consistently styles it, learning.

Beth is clearly on this wavelength as the group begins describing the prototype’s features. It is designed to be a toddler’s special buddy, helping him through tricky transitions or prompting him to reach important milestones that research says are critical features of socioemotional learning. When the child is struggling to settle down for a nap, for example, he can squeeze the doll’s arm and hear a particularly soothing voice — his mother’s — urging him to nod off. A simple voice recorder embedded in the toy allows the child’s mother to record herself expressing encouraging commands: “Potty time, Aidan!” or “Would you like an apple or raisins for snack now?” or “Night-night, lambchop!” An important feature of the voice recorder is that the doll can convey the family’s own particular language instead of the canned terms that LeapFrog producers might record. That is, one family might say “potty,” while another might use “toilet.” This kind of personalization is key, Beth emphasizes, because the research says that when toddlers are repeatedly exposed to terms with which they are familiar, their learning is enhanced. Her colleagues nod.

After a period of silence, a perplexed visitor raises a question: might it be unsettling for a toddler to hear his mother’s disembodied voice channeled through the toy? Toddlers are famous for their phobias: could this set off fears that his mother has somehow embedded herself in the toy? What will he think when the voice doesn’t answer him as his mother does, but in these prerecorded snippets? The eminent child psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott argued that a young child who becomes emotionally attached to a stuffed animal is projecting the feelings of love and security he feels with his mother onto this inanimate creature when she is not present. If that is the case, what are the psychological ramifications of channeling her voice through a toy? Beth looks at her boss uncomfortably. He twiddles his pencil. “Well,” he says after a few moments, “I guess we have to say that we put the mother’s voice in because the research said that babies’ and toddlers’ social interaction with the mother enhances learning.”

SMART TOYS

Over the past decade, the emphasis on offering learning experiences to babies and toddlers has created a dizzying array of industries, both cottage and well beyond. Today thousands of classes are offered for infants and toddlers, ranging from sign language to early music training to gymnastics, as well as classes that teach new mothers how to simply relax and do nothing with their infants. Parents often view these classes as prerequisites for getting into a good preschool, according to market research groups conducted by the Gymboree Corporation. Classes are often supplemented by videos or DVDs marketed as being developmentally appropriate for a toddler audience. In 2003 Amazon.com listed 140 videos or DVDs aimed at children aged two and younger; three years later, there were 750. According to the NPD Group, sales of toys billed as educational were up 50 percent in 2003 over 2002, the only toy category whose sales increased in a relatively slack market. Indeed, while overall toy sales have been flat or slightly declining in recent years, infant and toddler toy sales are seeing single-digit growth year after year.

To get a visceral sense of how the baby genius phenomenon has saturated the marketplace, you need only meander through the aisles of any baby superstore in the United States. Such is the demand for baby gear that even as massive toy-store chains like Toys “R” Us fold, baby-only emporiums such as Babies “R” Us and buybuy BABY flourish. There you’ll find a huge selection of cognitively stimulating mobiles, developmentally appropriate rattles, vibrating bouncy seats, educational baby videos, and crib attachments that soothe with classical music — all with packaging that highlights the lessons or special advantages that each product claims. LeapFrog can take a great deal of credit for pushing the baby genius movement forward, and its history and corporate culture offer a window into the anatomy of that world.

LeapFrog’s advertising tag line is “Learn Something New Every Day!” and it is admittedly religion within the corporate walls. At LeapFrog you hear the word “learning” invoked so often, by everyone from public relations assistants to high-ranking executives, that you wonder if the word means something more formal and monolithic here than it does elsewhere, the way “enlightenment” is used in a general way by most of us but has quite a specific meaning for practitioners of Buddhism or yoga. Founded by a former technology company executive, LeapFrog, launched in 1995, made its meteoric mark as one of the first companies to capitalize on crossing the educational toy market with the technology industry, producing what are often called “interactive toys” or “smart toys.” In the most basic sense, these are playthings with low-cost electronic chips embedded underneath a layer of soft material or plastic. When the chip is activated, the toy gives an aural or visual response; this cause-and-effect dynamic represents interactivity. What this translates to in toyland is generally gizmos that beep, play electronic ditties, and flash colorful lights, usually with numbers or letters emblazoned on them.

Presenting early academic skill activities in an electronic toy has come to define LeapFrog’s specific brand of learning. But it has also played a substantial role in transforming the definition of “learning” in the minds of consumers as well as the major toy producers. Today, when consumers are asked in surveys to describe an “educational” or “learning” toy, many mention an electronic gadget that displays a sequence of numbers or letters. Only a small segment of consumers prefers crafts or open-ended playthings, such as building blocks or dolls, to learning toys. According to analysts and marketers, LeapFrog’s marketing efforts have convinced customers from all walks of life that an electronic device is not just an educational toy but the educational toy. Such toys attract a wide customer base — what marketers call “mass and class” — low-income buyers as well as well-educated upper-middle-class consumers. According to LeapFrog’s own market research, and also focus groups conducted by Scholastic, LeapFrog products are especially popular with foreign-born Latina and Asian mothers for whom English is a second language, who believe that the toys will teach their children to speak English. These mothers are willing to pay a premium for LeapFrog products, often forgoing other toys or educational materials, such as books.

LeapFrog’s success, and its brand of “learning,” has had monumental repercussions in the toy industry. Just seven years after it was founded, LeapFrog became the third-largest toy maker in the country, behind Mattel (number one) and Hasbro. LeapFrog’s popularity forced the hands of Mattel’s and Hasbro’s early childhood divisions, Fisher-Price and Playskool, respectively. Largely because of LeapFrog’s popularity, Fisher-Price and Playskool now offer toys for babies or toddlers that feature electronics and claim to offer some type of academic lesson. According to toy-business executives and analysts, buyers for the large retail stores have come to believe that infant and toddler toys claiming to teach early academic skills produce the most profit. Toy makers explain that when they show toys that don’t promise to help a child learn, the buyers refuse to stock them. One high-level toy designer showed a group of major chain buyers a stuffed animal whose body parts — eyes, nose, and so on — were named on labels stitched into the fabric. The primary purpose of the toy was to help parents teach their babies the parts of the body. But, the designer said, the buyers balked: “They said, ‘Mothers don’t want to teach their children about their bodies. That’s not learning. Mothers want their babies to know the alphabet. Put ABC on it, and we’ll think about it.’” The company acquiesced, even though letters and numbers had no relation to the focus of the toy. It is sold today as a toy that promotes learning.

NO “LEARNING” TOYS

LeapFrog producers cringe at stories like this, even though they may ostensibly be good for business. The producers argue that slapping numbers and letters on a toy does not lead to learning. The company prides itself on the research behind each toy. Starting with the flagship product, the LeapPad, for which it is still best known, all LeapFrog’s subsequent learning products — ranging from TurboTwist Handhelds for middle-schoolers to Leap’s Phonics Railroad for toddlers — have been based to some degree on academic research. LeapFrog producers are passionate about research. They read stacks of educational journals and attend academic conferences. The company pays a number of professors in the field of education to consult on toy design. In fact, the LeapPad was inspired by a Stanford professor’s research on preliteracy. While launching LeapFrog, the founder, Mike Wood, consulted with the reading specialist Robert Calfee (who has chaired LeapFrog’s Educational Advisory Board since the company’s founding) and learned that preliteracy skills depend on “phonetic awareness.” That is, before children can learn how to read, they need to develop the specific understanding that words are composed of strings of smaller sounds. Supporting phonetic awareness is what adults versed in reading to children are doing, usually without thinking about it. As they read, they listen for the child to repeat a word she finds interesting; when she does, they enthusiastically repeat the word, too, and they sound it out slowly and clearly. For example, a child might point to a picture of a ladybug in a book and try to pronounce the word herself: “Yay-dee-buh!” In response, the adult might happily affirm: “Yes, that’s right! That is a LAY-dee-bug! A LAY-dee-bug!”

With the LeapPad, Wood set out to replicate electronically that encouraging of phonetic awareness and, beyond that, to achieve electronically what every book-loving adult does when reading to young children: sound out words, ask questions about characters, repeat favorite sections over and over again. Physically, the LeapPad is a booklike hardware and software unit designed for four- to eight-year-olds. A plastic base houses a touch-sensitive web of electronics as well as a low-cost sound chip. The software component is not a disk containing a program but a series of interactive books made of specially coated paper, similar to the material used for shipping pouches. The books fit into the plastic base and the two components work in tandem. When a child uses the stylus tethered to the base and touches one of the pictures or icons in the book, she can have the book read to her or hear each word, as well as its phonemes, pronounced. A child can use the stylus to point to an assortment of icons to activate even more reading-related activities.

But replicating what has always been a fluid, enjoyable experience for adult readers and young listeners turned out to be a very complicated technological task and a major graphics design challenge. Where a parent or other caregiver would naturally follow a child’s interest, asking her spontaneous questions about a particular appealing character, for example, the inert LeapPad can only simulate interactivity. To do this effectively, product designers had to presume that the child using it might be interested in everything, so they had to anticipate every question, or as many as possible. A great deal of stuff — icons, instructions, questions — had to be packed onto every page, with the result that a LeapPad “book” resembles a children’s book only in that it has pages.

Engineering the maximum percentage of learning per square inch of toy became the mission of LeapFrog under Wood’s leadership (he was ousted in 2004). All the effort that went into LeapPad’s design also meant that it cost more than the average children’s toy. The first LeapPad debuted as the Phonics Desk in 1995, with some success. But in 1999 it was relaunched as the LeapPad Learning System and became the industry’s top-selling toy in December 2000 — the first for an educational toy in more than fifteen years. Today LeapPad’s hardware component has a list price of fifty dollars, with LeapPad-compatible “books” listing for fifteen dollars apiece. This makes the LeapPad one of the most expensive mass-produced toys on the market, but that has not impeded sales. According to the company, 77 percent of U.S. households with young children own a LeapPad.