On my second night in the hospital, after 31 hours of labor, after a pair of blinking eyes had emerged from me ("He's sunny-side up!" a startled nurse shouted), after I'd crossed the threshold from child to parent, once I'd finally slid past my apprehension and awe into a semirelaxed slumber—my husband woke me up. "They think we should give him a bottle of formula," he said in a measured voice. "He's a little jaundiced, and you're not producing enough milk yet." I burst into tears. "We can't," I cried. "We can't do that to him!"
I was, of course, responding to the legitimate health warnings offered in every baby book known to womankind. Breast-fed babies have better immune systems! They bond more with their (thinner-from-breast-feeding) mothers! Their IQs might be higher! I was also, however, responding to the subtler influences of today's neurotic parenting philosophy. One bottle of formula and our child will be facing a compromised future!
In the end, I agreed to supplement with formula until my milk came in. Naturally, I chose a brand that advertised itself as loaded with DHA and ARA, the "smart" fatty acids, because I'm susceptible not only to peer pressure but also to savvy marketing. (For the record: The jury is still out on whether DHA and ARA will in fact boost your kid's IQ.) At the time, however, my resistance felt like pure maternal instinct.
Susan Gregory Thomas and Alissa Quart would have had a field day with me. Authors, respectively, of the books Buy, Buy Baby and Hothouse Kids, they offer sobering accounts of the forces propelling today's extreme parenting.
Thomas's look at this phenomenon is informed by her experience as a mother; Quart explores it with the insight—and melancholy—of someone who was herself a "hothouse kid." (Pushed by her father to be a young intellectual, she wrote her first novel when she was 7.) Both journalists, however, cast a critical eye in the direction of the ever-multiplying hucksters of children's "educational" props—the "Baby Genius Edutainment Complex," as Quart labels it—as well as at parents themselves. The two have been in a dysfunctional marriage for some time: Marketers manipulate parents by steering them toward often misleading research. Parents take the bait, reacting with irrational fear.
First, consider the evil marketers (since they're easier to blame than ourselves): Both authors are quick to point out that in the past decade, a feverish emphasis has been put on the neurological development of children from birth to 3 years old, leading to an explosion of educational tools for infants likely too young to benefit from them. (One health professional interviewed by Thomas posits that "the reason babies seemed so riveted on Baby Einstein videos was that they were actually slipping into what could be described as a low-level seizure state.")
This explosion began, according to Thomas, with a 1994 Carnegie Corporation report, which suggested that federal funding was needed for high-quality child care and health care because the blueprint for future brain development is set during the 0-to-3-year period. (And pardon me, sirs, but when can we expect such funding?)
Soon this notion became a cause célèbre: In 1997, Hollywood powerhouse Rob Reiner started I Am Your Child, a campaign to publicize infant neurological research—in particular, the theory that neural synapses form more quickly in babies' brains than previously thought. Hillary Clinton joined forces with Reiner, and later that same year, the White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning took place. Time and Newsweek ran cover stories about child brain development, and ABC aired a prime-time special directed by Reiner. Suddenly, the phrase 0 to 3 had entered the zeitgeist, despite the fact that, as Thomas notes, there wasn't any evidence that an enriched beginning of life guaranteed a brighter future—or that a traumatic start meant a dimmer one.
Illustrating the blind ambition of parents and marketers alike, Thomas writes that clinical psychologist Patricia Kuhl said at this conference that she believed infants learn language better from humans than from a recorded voice. (Kuhl later conducted studies that backed this up.) Within weeks, Thomas concludes with one eyebrow raised, the media juggernaut that is Baby Einstein—complete with digital voices teaching foreign languages on DVD—was launched, with founder Julie Aigner-Clark "[telling] the press she had been inspired by Kuhl's research."
Now, following a $25 million sale to Disney in 2001, Baby Einstein has become a household term—and a $250 million business. Countless other companies have since created DVDs, flash cards, even prenatal recordings designed to increase children's intelligence.
