Does the Baby Genius Edutainment Complex enrich your child’s mind—or stifle it?

Common wisdom holds that it is wholesome and American to give children the best chance for success: to fill their rooms with lush playthings, to adorn their walls with bright alphabet letters and their plates with mercury-free salmon. Lately, however, the pursuit of advantage has taken an extreme turn. Not long ago, words like gifted and precocious were applied mainly to older kids who read a lot, calculated in their heads, or took more than the average number of after-school classes. (I was one of them.) But in recent years, as a new child-enrichment business has marched into babyhood, right through infancy, and even into the womb, it sometimes seems as though any parent who doesn’t aspire to have his or her child show early evidence of “talent” is somehow being less than fully American.

The vast giftedness industry has expanded to include such disparate phenomena as the teaching of baby sign language, the IQ testing of toddlers, and the proliferation of video programs like the Baby Einstein series…

I call it the Baby Genius Edutainment Complex, the first stage of the American passion for making gifted children. It reflects a faith that if babies are exposed to enough stimulating multimedia content, typically in tandem with equally stirring classes, bright children can be invented…

The claims made by the producers of these DVDs and similar products may seem absurd, but the impulses that drive parents to purchase them are understandable. The wish to raise flourishing children is as old as humankind. Today’s Baby Genius Edutainment Complex yokes together two concepts of infant betterment: first, that parents can help a child develop many skills and aptitudes that are not inborn; and second, that if the child isn’t launched on the route to super-achievement in the first years of life, he or she will be doomed forever to mediocrity or worse. As this notion of a compressed time frame for baby-genius cultivation has become more widespread over the last ten years, parents have become much more susceptible to sales pitches for flash cards, DVDs, toys, and games that promise to provide “just the right level” of stimulation…

Schlaggar and many of the other neurologists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and child-development specialists I spoke with questioned the idea that educational toys or DVDs accomplish what their makers claim…

As Charles Nelson, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a preeminent scholar of the infant brain, puts it, “There is no proof of the value of the early-enrichment toys and videos in terms of brain science.” …

Source: Atlantic online
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200607/parenting