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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.

1
Learn Something New Every Day

IT IS MARCH 2004, around nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning in the Bay Area’s industrial-chic city of Emeryville, California. Although Beth, a producer at the technology toy company LeapFrog, is in the final stage of pregnancy — the bulky, drowsy stage — she is sharp and energetic as she discusses the features of a new toy prototype. Beth is one of the top producers in the LeapFrog Baby division, launched in 2004, and all eyes — both internally and in the business world at large — are watching closely. As with its products for older children, LeapFrog must protect its brand integrity by ensuring that its toys for infants and toddlers are designed for optimal learning. The prototype Beth is describing is an interactive plush frog that she and her team have been working on for several months. Some people who work here say that you can feel a high-pitched vibration in the air when a new product presentation is in progress. Then again, you can sense that vibe just about anytime at LeapFrog.

Walk by any cubicle in LeapFrog’s loftlike headquarters, and you see casually dressed product designers and producers gripping oversize stainless steel coffee mugs as they discuss a current project or weigh in with verve on someone else’s. Whiteboards are inscribed with diagrams and flow charts. There is something of a time-capsule feeling at LeapFrog, as if all the creative, manic, Ivy League energy that was evenly distributed throughout the Bay Area during the e-business era of the 1990s were preserved in these offices. Then that energy was largely directed at convincing Wall Street that Web-based business-to-business (B2B) companies would be the pillars of the New Economy. Now, at LeapFrog, it is aimed at making toys that enhance children’s cognitive development, or, as the company consistently styles it, learning.

Beth is clearly on this wavelength as the group begins describing the prototype’s features. It is designed to be a toddler’s special buddy, helping him through tricky transitions or prompting him to reach important milestones that research says are critical features of socioemotional learning. When the child is struggling to settle down for a nap, for example, he can squeeze the doll’s arm and hear a particularly soothing voice — his mother’s — urging him to nod off. A simple voice recorder embedded in the toy allows the child’s mother to record herself expressing encouraging commands: “Potty time, Aidan!” or “Would you like an apple or raisins for snack now?” or “Night-night, lambchop!” An important feature of the voice recorder is that the doll can convey the family’s own particular language instead of the canned terms that LeapFrog producers might record. That is, one family might say “potty,” while another might use “toilet.” This kind of personalization is key, Beth emphasizes, because the research says that when toddlers are repeatedly exposed to terms with which they are familiar, their learning is enhanced. Her colleagues nod.

After a period of silence, a perplexed visitor raises a question: might it be unsettling for a toddler to hear his mother’s disembodied voice channeled through the toy? Toddlers are famous for their phobias: could this set off fears that his mother has somehow embedded herself in the toy? What will he think when the voice doesn’t answer him as his mother does, but in these prerecorded snippets? The eminent child psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott argued that a young child who becomes emotionally attached to a stuffed animal is projecting the feelings of love and security he feels with his mother onto this inanimate creature when she is not present. If that is the case, what are the psychological ramifications of channeling her voice through a toy? Beth looks at her boss uncomfortably. He twiddles his pencil. “Well,” he says after a few moments, “I guess we have to say that we put the mother’s voice in because the research said that babies’ and toddlers’ social interaction with the mother enhances learning.”

SMART TOYS

Over the past decade, the emphasis on offering learning experiences to babies and toddlers has created a dizzying array of industries, both cottage and well beyond. Today thousands of classes are offered for infants and toddlers, ranging from sign language to early music training to gymnastics, as well as classes that teach new mothers how to simply relax and do nothing with their infants. Parents often view these classes as prerequisites for getting into a good preschool, according to market research groups conducted by the Gymboree Corporation. Classes are often supplemented by videos or DVDs marketed as being developmentally appropriate for a toddler audience. In 2003 Amazon.com listed 140 videos or DVDs aimed at children aged two and younger; three years later, there were 750. According to the NPD Group, sales of toys billed as educational were up 50 percent in 2003 over 2002, the only toy category whose sales increased in a relatively slack market. Indeed, while overall toy sales have been flat or slightly declining in recent years, infant and toddler toy sales are seeing single-digit growth year after year.

To get a visceral sense of how the baby genius phenomenon has saturated the marketplace, you need only meander through the aisles of any baby superstore in the United States. Such is the demand for baby gear that even as massive toy-store chains like Toys “R” Us fold, baby-only emporiums such as Babies “R” Us and buybuy BABY flourish. There you’ll find a huge selection of cognitively stimulating mobiles, developmentally appropriate rattles, vibrating bouncy seats, educational baby videos, and crib attachments that soothe with classical music — all with packaging that highlights the lessons or special advantages that each product claims. LeapFrog can take a great deal of credit for pushing the baby genius movement forward, and its history and corporate culture offer a window into the anatomy of that world.

LeapFrog’s advertising tag line is “Learn Something New Every Day!” and it is admittedly religion within the corporate walls. At LeapFrog you hear the word “learning” invoked so often, by everyone from public relations assistants to high-ranking executives, that you wonder if the word means something more formal and monolithic here than it does elsewhere, the way “enlightenment” is used in a general way by most of us but has quite a specific meaning for practitioners of Buddhism or yoga. Founded by a former technology company executive, LeapFrog, launched in 1995, made its meteoric mark as one of the first companies to capitalize on crossing the educational toy market with the technology industry, producing what are often called “interactive toys” or “smart toys.” In the most basic sense, these are playthings with low-cost electronic chips embedded underneath a layer of soft material or plastic. When the chip is activated, the toy gives an aural or visual response; this cause-and-effect dynamic represents interactivity. What this translates to in toyland is generally gizmos that beep, play electronic ditties, and flash colorful lights, usually with numbers or letters emblazoned on them.

Presenting early academic skill activities in an electronic toy has come to define LeapFrog’s specific brand of learning. But it has also played a substantial role in transforming the definition of “learning” in the minds of consumers as well as the major toy producers. Today, when consumers are asked in surveys to describe an “educational” or “learning” toy, many mention an electronic gadget that displays a sequence of numbers or letters. Only a small segment of consumers prefers crafts or open-ended playthings, such as building blocks or dolls, to learning toys. According to analysts and marketers, LeapFrog’s marketing efforts have convinced customers from all walks of life that an electronic device is not just an educational toy but the educational toy. Such toys attract a wide customer base — what marketers call “mass and class” — low-income buyers as well as well-educated upper-middle-class consumers. According to LeapFrog’s own market research, and also focus groups conducted by Scholastic, LeapFrog products are especially popular with foreign-born Latina and Asian mothers for whom English is a second language, who believe that the toys will teach their children to speak English. These mothers are willing to pay a premium for LeapFrog products, often forgoing other toys or educational materials, such as books.

LeapFrog’s success, and its brand of “learning,” has had monumental repercussions in the toy industry. Just seven years after it was founded, LeapFrog became the third-largest toy maker in the country, behind Mattel (number one) and Hasbro. LeapFrog’s popularity forced the hands of Mattel’s and Hasbro’s early childhood divisions, Fisher-Price and Playskool, respectively. Largely because of LeapFrog’s popularity, Fisher-Price and Playskool now offer toys for babies or toddlers that feature electronics and claim to offer some type of academic lesson. According to toy-business executives and analysts, buyers for the large retail stores have come to believe that infant and toddler toys claiming to teach early academic skills produce the most profit. Toy makers explain that when they show toys that don’t promise to help a child learn, the buyers refuse to stock them. One high-level toy designer showed a group of major chain buyers a stuffed animal whose body parts — eyes, nose, and so on — were named on labels stitched into the fabric. The primary purpose of the toy was to help parents teach their babies the parts of the body. But, the designer said, the buyers balked: “They said, ‘Mothers don’t want to teach their children about their bodies. That’s not learning. Mothers want their babies to know the alphabet. Put ABC on it, and we’ll think about it.’” The company acquiesced, even though letters and numbers had no relation to the focus of the toy. It is sold today as a toy that promotes learning.

NO “LEARNING” TOYS

LeapFrog producers cringe at stories like this, even though they may ostensibly be good for business. The producers argue that slapping numbers and letters on a toy does not lead to learning. The company prides itself on the research behind each toy. Starting with the flagship product, the LeapPad, for which it is still best known, all LeapFrog’s subsequent learning products — ranging from TurboTwist Handhelds for middle-schoolers to Leap’s Phonics Railroad for toddlers — have been based to some degree on academic research. LeapFrog producers are passionate about research. They read stacks of educational journals and attend academic conferences. The company pays a number of professors in the field of education to consult on toy design. In fact, the LeapPad was inspired by a Stanford professor’s research on preliteracy. While launching LeapFrog, the founder, Mike Wood, consulted with the reading specialist Robert Calfee (who has chaired LeapFrog’s Educational Advisory Board since the company’s founding) and learned that preliteracy skills depend on “phonetic awareness.” That is, before children can learn how to read, they need to develop the specific understanding that words are composed of strings of smaller sounds. Supporting phonetic awareness is what adults versed in reading to children are doing, usually without thinking about it. As they read, they listen for the child to repeat a word she finds interesting; when she does, they enthusiastically repeat the word, too, and they sound it out slowly and clearly. For example, a child might point to a picture of a ladybug in a book and try to pronounce the word herself: “Yay-dee-buh!” In response, the adult might happily affirm: “Yes, that’s right! That is a LAY-dee-bug! A LAY-dee-bug!”

With the LeapPad, Wood set out to replicate electronically that encouraging of phonetic awareness and, beyond that, to achieve electronically what every book-loving adult does when reading to young children: sound out words, ask questions about characters, repeat favorite sections over and over again. Physically, the LeapPad is a booklike hardware and software unit designed for four- to eight-year-olds. A plastic base houses a touch-sensitive web of electronics as well as a low-cost sound chip. The software component is not a disk containing a program but a series of interactive books made of specially coated paper, similar to the material used for shipping pouches. The books fit into the plastic base and the two components work in tandem. When a child uses the stylus tethered to the base and touches one of the pictures or icons in the book, she can have the book read to her or hear each word, as well as its phonemes, pronounced. A child can use the stylus to point to an assortment of icons to activate even more reading-related activities.

But replicating what has always been a fluid, enjoyable experience for adult readers and young listeners turned out to be a very complicated technological task and a major graphics design challenge. Where a parent or other caregiver would naturally follow a child’s interest, asking her spontaneous questions about a particular appealing character, for example, the inert LeapPad can only simulate interactivity. To do this effectively, product designers had to presume that the child using it might be interested in everything, so they had to anticipate every question, or as many as possible. A great deal of stuff — icons, instructions, questions — had to be packed onto every page, with the result that a LeapPad “book” resembles a children’s book only in that it has pages.

Engineering the maximum percentage of learning per square inch of toy became the mission of LeapFrog under Wood’s leadership (he was ousted in 2004). All the effort that went into LeapPad’s design also meant that it cost more than the average children’s toy. The first LeapPad debuted as the Phonics Desk in 1995, with some success. But in 1999 it was relaunched as the LeapPad Learning System and became the industry’s top-selling toy in December 2000 — the first for an educational toy in more than fifteen years. Today LeapPad’s hardware component has a list price of fifty dollars, with LeapPad-compatible “books” listing for fifteen dollars apiece. This makes the LeapPad one of the most expensive mass-produced toys on the market, but that has not impeded sales. According to the company, 77 percent of U.S. households with young children own a LeapPad.