Buy, Buy Baby: How Big Business Captures the Ultimate Consumer – Your Baby or Toddler

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.