The supply of, and demand for, expertise began to make a neat loop from expert to press to parent to product. As some pediatricians became celebrities, advertisers and marketers were quick to recognize that their endorsements would be invaluable. And these pediatricians realized that they could transmit their messages more effectively by endorsing a product than by preaching from a lectern. Arnold Gesell, director of the Yale Clinic of Child Development in the 1930s and ’40s, may have been the first nationally known pediatrician to recognize the power of marketing. It was in part Gesell’s willingness to promote his ideas in commercial forums that inspired many toy manufacturers to hire child psychologists to endorse their infant and toddler toys.
At the turn of the century, child experts had proclaimed that the way young children were treated had a demonstrable effect on their adult personalities, and thus the very future of humanity, and that following scientific methods of child-rearing was paramount in securing that future. The emergence of the Roosevelt era’s “scientific motherhood” reflected the culture’s break from the past and a clear-eyed march into modernity; ads directed at young mothers appealed to their own expertise by promoting products that might help them do the job conferred on them by the 1899 National Congress of Mothers. But by the mid-1940s, part of mothers’ responsibility was to instill a sense of patriotic spirit and moral fiber in their young children. Ads now claimed that toys would enhance not only the intellect but civic duty as well. At the war’s end — and the official start of the Baby Boom — the banner headline of a 1946 Playskool advertisement in Parents’ Magazine, featuring a drawing of a baby happily fitting the final ring on a stacker toy, read: A CHILD AT PLAY TODAY … A RESPONSIBLE CITIZEN TOMORROW. The ad copy promoted Playskool toys’ credentials: “Playskool educational toys are designed in co-operation with child psychologists. They direct the play instincts into channels that build muscular control, eye-hand coordination, color and shape perception.”
These ads conferred expert status on the product itself. Instead of being touted for its ability to help a parent help her child, the toy could channel the experts all by itself. The cult of the child-rearing expert and the marketing industry were beginning to merge. The message running through articles on child-rearing was: leave it to the experts. And on facing pages were ads exerting an even more powerful commercial undertow: leave it to the expert-endorsed products.
SUPERBABY
Nobody took this advice more seriously than Baby Boomers, those Americans born between 1946 and 1964. In the 1970s and ’80s, this group became parents, bringing to the experience an obsession not just with child-rearing expertise but also with academic research on infants. Research on babies and toddlers came into its own as an academic field in the 1980s. What would come to be known as the golden age of infant research in the United States came about in part because more women were working in academia, forcing universities to consider seriously the study of infant and child development. Moreover, technology had improved on Piaget’s primary tools of pen, paper, and observation; video had become less expensive and made precise recording and analysis possible. Researchers in the 1980s were beginning to discover that infants were not only capable of constructing pictures of the world but were much more precocious from the very start than anyone had previously appreciated. Often comparing babies to phenomenally powerful computers, academics reported that infants were born with a nuanced capacity for interacting with parents and caregivers. The infants’ specific responses were in fact part of an evolutionary strategy to help adults tailor teachings particularly for them. A baby was actually designed to teach his parents. The coo that his mother found so adorable was engineered to be adorable so that its message — “You are on the right track here” — would be understood. The new buzzword was “competent,” used to describe the ingenious babies, whose parents, many studies found, often failed to engage them adequately.
In an era in which power-suited mothers were analyzed at every turn — from Newsweek’s 1980 cover story “The Superwoman Squeeze” to the 1987 Diane Keaton movie Baby Boom — working women were now struggling both to achieve competence in their careers and to be competent enough to stimulate their competent babies. The struggle became ever more public, as coverage of the academic findings on the infant brain became standard not just in women’s and parenting magazines but also in Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times. Superwoman was, it seemed, no match for her offspring, dubbed by the press “superbaby.”
The rate at which scientific findings about infant learning made their way from academic journals to mainstream press reports to product cycles was more compressed than ever. The findings themselves were also becoming ever more compressed. Academics, though pleased in many ways to share their work widely through a newspaper or newsweekly, were disturbed by how much of the nuance in their research was lost in the process.
The problem that worried experts most was age compression, or what would ultimately become known as Kids Getting Older Younger. The term “superbaby” should have conveyed that infants are a lot more alert and aware than previously thought. What the popular press conveyed, however, was that superbaby was a miniature 1980s super-woman, a baby yuppie ready to embark on a course of bourgeois self-improvement and achievement — not when she graduated from Harvard but right now. The 1980s saw the marketing of infant flash cards, designed to drill little geniuses on their ABC’s and 1-2-3’s. Yuppie mothers had step aerobics classes; yuppie babies had Gymboree classes.
PRENATAL UNIVERSITY
Some of the most bizarre innovations in baby products emerged from 1980s academic research focusing on the origins of literacy. The established assumption had been that children are ready to start learning to read when they first receive formal instruction at about age six, usually from their first-grade teacher. That timetable made it almost impossible for teachers to diagnose and attend to reading-related learning disabilities at an early enough age. Because children were assumed to be blank reading slates before school age, teachers had no context to draw on when a child showed signs of reading difficulties in school. Did the trouble stem from developmental issues, or were there cultural barriers that could be addressed? In looking for answers to that question, academics discovered that reading skills began far earlier than first grade; in fact, the foundations of literacy clearly began in infancy. The research revealed that children who were “bathed” in language from the start — spoken to, read to, encouraged to tell their own stories and share their thoughts — were far more likely to be able to read by school age than those who weren’t. In short order, academic terms such as “pre-reading skills,” “emergent literacy,” and “prerequisites to reading” were introduced into the popular lexicon via newsweeklies and parenting magazines devoted to keeping anxious Boomers abreast of the latest baby research.
An outfit based in Hayward, California, that called itself Prenatal University was among the first to capitalize on the burgeoning compulsion to raise literate children. Founded in 1979 by an obstetrician-gynecologist named F. Rene Van de Carr, the course taught expectant parents how to channel a fetus’s attention, help her build a useful vocabulary, and learn lullabies. In the fifth month of pregnancy, for example, students were taught how to engage in the “Kick Game,” an activity requiring parents to massage the area of the mother’s belly where the fetus had kicked, wait for a response, and then massage again to set up a sort of in utero Morse communication. After two months of this conditioning, the curriculum expanded to teaching the fetus Dr. Van