George Morrison

Defenseless Against the Hucksters?

Well, another one of those books designed to scare us out of our parenting minds has landed in our midst!

Susan Gregory Thomas’ Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds, warns us that we are in the midst of a dangerous economic shift and that “our kids are becoming consumers at alarmingly young ages and suffering all the ills that rampant materialism used to visit only on adults—from anxiety to hyper competitiveness to depression.”

How’s that for alarmist journalism and getting our attention?

Silly me! All along, I thought the dangerous economic shifts our country is experiencing can be blamed on $100 a barrel oil, increasing gasoline prices, a plummeting dollar, outsourcing of jobs, international trade imbalances, sub-prime mortgages and an abysmal housing market. Now we have to worry that our infants and toddlers are spending too much on DVDs and other products claiming to make them the best and the brightest! And it’s our entire fault! We should know better! We should see behind the veil of false advertising of manufacturers who claim their products will help our children learn and the lure of the fool’s gold of technological child rearing.

In addition to being against big business for foisting products for young children on unsuspecting parents and making dubious claims about promoting learning, Thomas just doesn’t care much for all the children’s technological products either. She likes blocks better.

Thomas has some good things to say and her book does serve some useful purposes.

First, we need journalists like her to call our attention to and remind us of the vastness of the consumer market for children’s toys, products and technology—in excess of $20 billon a year. That is a lot of money, even though it pales in comparison to the $145 billon 2008 federal budget request for the war in Iraq.

Second, Thomas gets us to think about consumerism and its effects on parents and young children. She rightly points out that companies target the infant toddler market with products designed to appeal to parents’ desires to have their children learn at an early age—the earlier the better and to grow up smart.

But, this revelation is nothing new. We can thank brain research and research about the importance of the early years for creating a national interest in young children. This in turn has caught the attention of business and industry. Companies are doing what comes naturally for them. They are creating markets for what they think parents want and need for their children. After all, we live, work and educate in an entrepreneurial society.

Caveat Emptor!

For their part, Montessorians know a lot about the entrepreneurial environment of early education.

Thomas also points out that many products targeted at kids do not live up to their hype. Again this is not new—think of all the products marketed to you and me that don’t live up to their claims! However, recent research studies make us more aware of how parents can’t just buy products and believe they will do what the label says they will do.

Take for example, DVDs such as Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby. In a recent study, researchers found they may be doing more harm than good. Rather than enhance language development, they may delay it.

Frederick Zimmerman and Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. “The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew,” says Christakis. “These babies scored about 10 percent lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos.” The researchers believe that parents are giving their children too much DVD and television viewing. The result is over-stimulated kids and inattention problems. They recommend that parents provide their infants and toddlers with more “face time.”

This is where Thomas comes to the rescue of parents who are duped and hood winked by the advertising media about children’s DVDs and other products. She recommends that parents “hang out” with their children and “do nothing.”

“Hanging out” covers a lot of territory and I’m not sure what it means for others. I know from my experiences that infants and toddlers like to be held, kissed, hugged, engaged, and play with toys. “Hanging out” can also include watching and listening to DVDs or playing a game such as Jump Start Baby. So, “hanging out” in this sense can be good.

For some parents on the other hand, “doing nothing” means exactly that! They literally don’t do anything with or for their children. All of us have counseled with these kinds of parents and they are the ones that often scare me the most. They need a lot of help and encouragement to know what is right and good for their children and to understand it is their responsibility to provide it!

Some parents have a hard time just “hanging out” with their children because they don’t have the time or energy!

These are the parents who are juggling careers and children rearing. Some of these parents are exactly the ones who use the Baby Einstein and other DVDs to get some time for themselves, for other family members or to prepare the evening meal!

Thomas claims that the major reason parents don’t hang out with their kids is because the federal government won’t let them! (I’m not kidding!).

If the government provided family leave, flexible work hours, child care, fair wages and health insurance for all children, then parents would have lots more time to “hang out,” “do nothing” and “see what unfolds.”

For now, I think most of us are going to have to get along with what we have been doing—raising children the best we can in the context of a materialistic, consumer oriented, technological society.

For my part, I also do my best to help my students and others learn about developmentally appropriate practices and to understand that it is not appropriate to put infants in “time out” or to prop kids in front of a Baby Einstein or any other DVD for hours on end.

However, we also discuss the value and purposes and place of technology in their lives, and children’s and families’ lives. We evaluate children’s DVDs and software so that they are knowledgeable and informed consumers. We discuss the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation about not allowing children under two to view any television.

But, we also discuss the impracticality of this recommendation for most families.

So, should you read Thomas’ book?

As I have indicated, Thomas has many interesting things to say. But, she also has some goofy ideas and an investigative journalist’s axe to grind. Before I bought the book, I’d check with my local library.

George S. Morrison is the author of Early Childhood Education Today and is the Velma E. Schmidt Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of North Texas.