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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.

Quickly, LeapFrog sought to reach even younger consumers. In 2001, the company released My First LeapPad, which is shaped like a bus and geared to three- to five-year-olds; in 2003, the LittleTouch LeapPad (list price thirty-five dollars) debuted, aimed at babies and toddlers from six to thirty-six months. LeapFrog’s product line had always been geared to the age range from prekindergarten — four-year-olds — to the tail end of junior high school. But its forays into the baby and toddler toy category were so successful that LeapFrog officially launched its LeapFrog Baby line in 2004 with great fanfare at the International Toy Fair, the annual trade show held in New York City. By 2006 the lineup had grown far beyond the LittleTouch LeapPad and plush interactive dolls to include more than three dozen toys, including the Learning Piano, which offers three “LeapStages” activity cards that trigger different musical and voice recordings (names of instruments and how they sound; snippets of songs like “London Bridge”; and a counting song featuring a cow, two pigs, three sheep, four cats, and five ducks); the Learn & Groove Musical Table, which plays forty “learning songs” and introduces letters and numbers in English or Spanish; the Learn & Groove Alphabet Drum, which, with each bang, displays letters from A to Z in lights while a recorded voice identifies each one (again, in either English or Spanish); and the Learn & Groove Counting Maracas, which count from one to ten, name colors, and pronounce vocabulary words with each shake.

The highlight for LeapFrog at the 2006 toy fair, where the product was placed center stage in a mock living room complete with comfy leather chairs and a large-screen TV, was Baby’s Little Leaps Grow-With-Me Learning System. The product includes a console base/DVD player connected to a TV and a wireless controller with two sides: the baby side, recommended for infants from nine to twenty-four months, has oversized buttons; the toddler side, twenty-four months and up, features a joystick. Press materials explained that the infant or toddler affects what happens onscreen by “exposing” himself to “active learning experiences that change with every touch, slide and toggle.” A brand manager explained that the product’s goal was to “bathe the child in language.” Like other LeapFrog products, the manager said, the Little Leaps system is “about giving Moms and Dads the tools they need to help children learn.” Indeed, LeapFrog Baby’s mission from the outset was to support parents in helping their babies and toddlers learn. It came from a key piece of market research, a product line manager explained: “We talked to moms, and they told us there were a lot of developmental toys for baby out there, but that there were no ‘learning’ toys.”

STARTING POINTS

Ask a child developmental psychologist or an early childhood educator to discuss the distinction between a “developmental” and a “learning” toy for infants and toddlers, and you will be met with a puzzled look. In early child development, the commonly accepted understanding is that there is really no difference between development and learning for infants and toddlers: they are one and the same. While it may be possible to tease apart cognitive learning from socioemotional learning from physical learning starting with the late twos and three-year-olds — when toddlers begin to become more social and, therefore, developmentally capable of practicing empathy — it is not possible to separate these types before that age. A physical milestone, such as learning to walk, is inextricably linked with the socioemotional milestone of learning to separate from the mother or other regular caregiver; this independence is, in turn, inextricably linked with the cognitive milestone of learning to assign words or gestures to specific things or personal needs. Furthermore, “learning” takes place in a social context — that is, between a young child and a caregiver. It is specifically through this interaction that young children create what Lev Vygotsky — generally considered to be Piaget’s counterpart in child development — called “mental tools.” After a child has acquired these mental tools, she may apply them in a wide variety of situations. That is, an eight-year-old who has mastered fine motor skills, has the ability to think abstractly and understand symbols, and has a certain level of comfort with technology can use a computer effectively. A baby cannot.

The idea that there is a difference between “learning” and “development” may have taken root with the 1994 publication of a Carnegie Corporation report focusing on the care of infants and toddlers — children from zero to three years old. The report was called Starting Points, and, like other federally commissioned reports before it, this one underscored the need for high-quality child care and health care, as well as parent education and support for families with young children. But this report was different from its predecessors in that it highlighted neuroscience as a justification for providing federally funded services for babies and toddlers. The Carnegie task force maintained that between the ages of zero and three, neural synapses formed far more quickly than scientists had previously understood. The way the brain developed in the long run depended profoundly on a child’s experience during these first critical years. Moreover, young children subjected to severe neglect would suffer irrevocable neural damage. At least, those conclusions could be surmised from the extant data. Actually, the report admitted, “researchers say that neurobiologists using brain scan technologies are on the verge of confirming these findings.”

While it was accurate to say that a gust of synaptic connections are made in the baby brain, some in the field said that this was not news; such findings were at least a decade old at that point. Also, the report did not emphasize that the very young brain was doing the equally important work of pruning back the thicket of synaptic connections. Without this editing process, the brain would be continuously and intolerably overwhelmed, unable to make meaningful connections or draw conclusions — in short, unable to make sense of the world.

The report briefly acknowledged that no neuroscientific research substantiated the suggestion that babies and toddlers raised in impoverished circumstances were doomed to long-term cognitive deficits. Nor was there any evidence proving that an “enriched” environment in early childhood led to increased social, emotional, and intellectual prowess later in life. Studies had shown that mice kept in a state of privation grew far fewer brain synapses than those raised in stimulating, nurturing environments. But the brain-scan technologies that the Carnegie task force referred as “on the verge of confirming these findings” could not be used on healthy infants. Positron emission tomography (PET), one of the brain-imaging technologies that allows scientists to observe neural activity in living subjects, requires the injection of radioactive substances that scientists are legally and ethically forbidden from administering to normal, healthy children. The other technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), requires absolute stillness. There were simply no data on normal, healthy infants or toddlers, nor were any parents likely to give permission for their children to be studied under such circumstances.

TOXIC OR NONTOXIC

The report did, however, impress two heavyweights: Rob Reiner and Hillary Clinton. The actor-writer-director launched the child advocacy group I Am Your Child (since renamed Parents’ Action for Children) in 1997, a campaign to publicize what his promotional materials characterized as the latest “breakthroughs in brain research” in children from zero to three. Reiner’s efforts were driven by the conviction that if America’s parents and policymakers realized the importance and lifelong impact of neural activity in the first three years, the result could be a cultural transformation. As Reiner proclaimed in a 1998 address to the National Association of Counties: “Whether or not a child becomes a toxic or nontoxic member of society is largely determined by what happens to the child in terms of his experiences with his parents and primary caregivers in those first three years … justice begins in the high chair, not the electric chair.”

What leading researchers studying the infant mind had been discovering since Piaget was that babies and toddlers are, in a sense, another species: fascinating and categorically different from adults. Instead of focusing on adults as the product of childhood development, the research suggested that offering babies and toddlers the most supportive care possible is the right thing to do because they are society’s most vulnerable people (and, arguably, its most delightful). “Children aren’t just valuable because they will turn into grownups but because they are thinking, feeling people themselves,” wrote Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl in The Scientist in the Crib. “Child abuse isn’t evil because it may produce neurotic adults but because it abuses children.”

Yet as Reiner clearly recognized, in the past American legislators and the public have been unconvinced by such idealistic sentiments. What did it matter what happened to children under three if they would never remember any of it as adults? What was the return on the investment? If neuroscience could prove that early childhood experiences had a measurable effect on the final product — the adult — then perhaps the public and Congress would understand that nurturing babies is good because it creates confident adults who can contribute productively to the workforce. Offering the very young high-quality, standards-based, government-supported daycare would be in society’s best interests in the long run. Conversely, neglecting or abusing young children would create angry, violent adults who deplete the tax base and threaten the quality of life. When Reiner made a call to the Clinton White House in the mid-1990s, he found a more than willing collaborator in Hillary Rodham Clinton.

THE BRAIN CONFERENCE

Reiner’s collaboration with the Clintons culminated in the White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning, which convened in April 1997, to unprecedented press coverage and celebrity fanfare. In the months leading up to the event, Time ran a cover story entitled “How a Child’s Brain Develops and What It Means for Childcare and Welfare Reform.” Newsweek devoted an entire issue to “Your Child: From Birth to Three,” with Reiner and White House staff members as editorial consultants and Johnson & Johnson as the exclusive corporate advertiser. The special edition sold about a million copies worldwide, setting a record for the magazine; indeed, the issue was so popular that it went through several printings. ABC aired the prime-time special I Am Your Child, directed by Reiner and starring Roseanne Barr, Mel Brooks, Billy Crystal, Tom Hanks, Charlton Heston, Rosie O’Donnell, and Robin Williams.

White House planners divided the conference into two parts, the first of which was devoted to “the new brain research.” Only one neuroscientist spoke. Dr. Carla Shatz, a neurobiologist at Berkeley, summarized the existing research on infant brains, which was not new. She offered a Brain Wiring 101 talk, which covered much of the same ground as the Carnegie report by explaining that it was the brain’s job to build and then prune synaptic connections during the first three years and that loving caregivers along with life itself seemed to do an excellent job of facilitating this process.

The only other scientist who spoke at the conference was the clinical psychologist Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, the leading specialist on how infants acquire language. Kuhl described babies as eager communicators who required no special “input” to learn language, other than the typical mutually enjoyable interchanges of baby and caregiver. Her research had shown, Kuhl said, that while infants are born with the remarkable capacity to discriminate all the sound contrasts used in any language of the world, they begin to tune in particularly to the phonemes of their native language or the languages spoken regularly at home or in daycare. When President Clinton urged her to designate “some minimum threshold vocal interplay” or provide some evidence that leaving the TV on didn’t provide adequate verbal stimulation, Kuhl said that wasn’t possible. Kuhl was pretty confident that a recorded voice would not enhance language development because babies are so sociable and because that’s part of what helps them learn about language — to say nothing of love. Indeed, Kuhl’s 2003 experiment proved that nine-month-old American infants who were spoken to in Mandarin Chinese by a native speaker for less than five hours in a laboratory setting were able to distinguish phonetic elements of that language. In a companion study, Kuhl showed that another group of American infants exposed to the same Mandarin material via DVD or audiotape showed no ability to distinguish phonetic units of that language.

Within weeks of Kuhl’s comment at the 1997 conference, Aigner-Clark had launched Baby Einstein, complete with a soundtrack featuring disembodied voices speaking words in foreign languages. She told the press she had been inspired by Kuhl’s research.

THE MOZART EFFECT

A few weeks later, a former choral instructor named Don Campbell popularized the Mozart Effect in a book of that title, which claimed that listening to classical music is a panacea. The Mozart Effect was based on a research paper published in 1993 by the British journal Nature, in which two professors at the University of California at Irvine reported that after listening to eight minutes and twenty-four seconds of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, thirty-six college students scored eight to nine points higher on a set of spatial reasoning problems in the Stanford-Binet intelligence tests than students who had not listened to the sonata. The boost, which the researchers called the “Mozart Effect,” lasted ten minutes. The same researchers published a follow-up study a year later reporting that the effect could be produced only by listening to Mozart, not other music (namely, works by Philip Glass or British technopop). To determine if music in general could offer more lasting results for spatial learning in young children, the UC Irvine researchers also studied a group of three-year-olds in a Los Angeles public preschool program. Of the thirty-three children, twenty-two received eight months of fairly rigorous music training, including daily group singing instruction, weekly private lessons on electronic keyboards, and daily keyboard practice and play.

The researchers reported that when tested on a spatial reasoning task — putting puzzles together — “the children’s scores dramatically improved after they received music lessons.” The preschoolers who had not received the training showed no change in their spatial test scores. From this study, the researchers theorized that spatial reasoning, like musical performance, “requires forming an ideal mental representation of something which is eventually realized.” They said they had “shown that music education may be a valuable tool for the enhancement of preschool children’s intellectual development.”

The original Mozart Effect study seemed odd, and the results marginal and of dubious value. By 1999 follow-up experiments published in Nature and Psychological Science could not reproduce the findings, which the scientific community took to mean that the originally published Mozart Effect was an anomaly. No research had shown that the Mozart Effect applied to children, and the follow-up study suggested that music lessons, not just listening to music, was an engaging and complex activity that stimulated many cognitive functions. No research of any kind had been done on infants and toddlers.

But in the wake of the White House Conference and the national focus on zero- to three-year-olds, the promise of building better brains through classical music became a media virus. Don Campbell capitalized on the success of his book and the zero-to-three zeitgeist by starting a virtual publishing franchise, featuring CDs such as The Mozart Effect — Music for Children, which was a fixture on Billboard’s Top Classical Albums chart for over six months, followed by the chart-busters The Mozart Effect — Music for Babies and Love Chords — Music for the Pregnant Mother and Her Unborn Child, featuring baroque compositions and a twenty-four-page companion book. Copycats followed. Delos Records mined the effect with Baby Needs Mozart, featuring flutists Eugenia Zukerman and Jean-Pierre Rampal, pianist Carol Rosenberger, and clarinetist David Shifrin, and a follow-up, Baby Needs Baroque. Mozart and other classical composers inspired entire lines of baby toys.

Perhaps nowhere was the Mozart Effect more potent than in Georgia. In 1998 governor Zell Miller asked the state legislature to approve funding for classical music CDs to be distributed to all parents leaving the hospital with their newborn babies. At the press conference to launch his “Build Your Baby’s Brain Through the Power of Music” campaign, Miller, flanked by representatives of Sony Music Entertainment, announced: “No one doubts that listening to music, especially at a very early age, affects the spatial-temporal reasoning that underlies math, engineering, and chess.” Soon Florida, Colorado, and other states followed suit.

THE BIG HURRY

The Clintons’ brain conference and the Mozart Effect never would have taken root if they had not fallen on fertile soil. The relationship between young children, learning, and marketing in America was forged long before the 1990s. Piaget himself once famously complained after one of his lecture tours to the United States: “Why is it that when I come to America and give lectures on children’s development and cognitive stages, there are always three of four people who get up in the audience and say, ‘That’s great, but how can we make kids do it sooner?’ What’s the big hurry?” The hurry may have started more than a hundred years ago.

In Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children, a comprehensive history of child-rearing advice, Ann Hulbert cites the 1899 convening of the National Congress of Mothers in Washington, D.C., as marking the start of the “professionalizing” of child-rearing. For the first time, such topics as proper nutrition, appropriate stimulation, and general infant care were discussed in scientific papers rather than simply passed down at home from one generation to the next. Advisers in child-rearing were now nationally known pediatricians issuing dictums from lecterns, rather than grandmothers demonstrating burping techniques in the nursery. Science, not sentimentality, was to be mothers’ new guiding principle. The experts at the conference made it clear that “the superior stage of the race” was at stake. In that era of Teddy Roosevelt’s trademark “strenuosity,” women were for the first time in history exhorted to take on the role of motherhood not just as an avocation but as a vocation, and the seeds for today’s approach to motherhood were sown. Some practices of that new scientific motherhood bear a distinctive ancestral resemblance to those in contemporary America.

The expert advice presented at the 1899 meeting of mothers was well publicized, and articles on scientific motherhood and its methods became staples of women’s magazines. Except for some tweaking to modernize the language, the headline in the April 1910 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine could easily have run as the lead feature in any parenting magazine of the past twenty years: “What Is to Become of Your Baby? Will children reared under the new, scientific methods be superior mentally and physically to those reared in the old-fashioned ways of our mothers?” Child developmental experts became important public figures, and toy companies began hiring developmental psychologists to approve the educational aptness of their products. Companies that hired experts may not have had children’s best interests at heart so much as a return on their investment by capitalizing on the obsession with expert child-rearing research and advice. Experts, in turn, depended on good relations with the press to drive home their messages, and the press made them celebrities. The experts’ theories on infant care became regular features in newspapers, parenting magazines (Parents was founded in 1926), and even educational films screened at department stores in tandem with product promotions.

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 de Carr’s “primary-word list,” which included words such as “pat,” “rub,” “squeeze,” “shake,” “stroke,” and “tap.” Parents were instructed to use a rolled-up newspaper as a megaphone to direct their voices at the fetus while conveying the associated actions via her pregnant tummy at least twice a day. Three or four weeks before birth, the fetus’s curriculum was further enriched with a “secondary-word list,” since, according to the Prenatal University’s president, the fetus was now ready to learn words she “might need to know in the first few months after birth,” including “tongue,” “powder,” “burp,” “yawn,” “ice cream,” and “throw up.” As extra credit, really ambitious parents could teach Infantspeak, ten words Van de Carr deemed critical for early talking: “dada,” “mama,” and “bye-bye,” as well as “din din” (for food other than milk) and “poo poo” (for diaper change). At birth, the baby received her degree: “Baby Superior.” At this point, explained Van de Carr in a newspaper interview, “the child is already a success, has already achieved, is already a winner … the parents’ expectations have already been met.” Now, he said, parents “can just relax and enjoy their baby.”

Fetal conditioning was just the start for many 1980s superbabies. The importance of auditory stimulation in utero was further emphasized in the parenting book How to Have a Smarter Baby. Written by a professor of nursing and a lay writer, the book counseled expectant parents to play recordings of their own voices or soothing music, which, the book’s jacket copy misleadingly claimed, would be part of “an easy 15-minute-a-day program that can raise your baby’s IQ as much as 27 to 30 points … and increase his or her attention span by as much 10 to 45 minutes.” Although the book’s authors would later try to backpedal on that extraordinary — and, ultimately, specious — claim, the word was out. For truly time-squeezed superwomen unable to enroll in fetal classes, technology had a solution. Newspaper and television stories reported seeing pregnant women on the way to work with a Sony Walkman stretched across the belly, piping in recordings of Laurence Olivier reading sonnets. Gadgets such as the Pregaphone, which resembled an oversize stethoscope, claimed to be able to do that job better than a home-jiggered Walkman. Making its debut at the 1986 consumer trade show Babyfair — its third annual show of the latest in infant and toddler products — the Pregaphone was launched while Susan K. Golant, coauthor of How to Have a Smarter Baby, spoke on a Babyfair panel, emphasizing that the point of her book was not “creating superbabies … the point is having well-loved babies.”

PLAYLAB

Companies that make educational or “learning” toys for very young children today still cleave to some of the corporate traditions of their predecessors. For example, in the 1940s Playskool and Fisher-Price put experts on the payroll and later built product-testing facilities where local children were invited to put prototype toys through their paces. The companies gave these facilities scientific-sounding names such as the Playskool Institute and Fisher-Price’s PlayLab, and asked child development experts to assist in product research. It was a maneuver of marketing genius. These testing facilities acquired the patina of respected institutions, which lent the toys educational legitimacy and allowed the toy companies to take advantage of children’s curiosity and parents’ status seeking to conduct usability studies and market research for free. Today, instead of inviting experts with advanced degrees to visit the lab, companies hire them to run the labs full-time.

Kathleen Alfano, who holds a Ph.D. in elementary education, has headed Fisher-Price’s PlayLab for more than twenty years. Her assistants are all certified in early childhood education. LeapFrog’s lab staff is even more academically distinguished. It is headed by Jim Gray, who earned a Ph.D. in early childhood development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was a protégé of Howard Gardner, the celebrated author of Multiple Intelligences. Gray manages two full-time assistants, one of whom holds a doctorate in developmental psychology; the other earned a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s renowned Media Lab, where cutting-edge robotics and learning technologies are researched. Both PlayLab and the LeapFrog Lab are state-of-the-art facilities, equipped with one-way-mirrored observation rooms and professional video resources. PlayLab is set up as a preschool, with areas for imaginative play, outdoor activities, and snack. In western New York State, gaining admission to PlayLab has an elite aura comparable to that of enrolling in a private Manhattan preschool. Many parents reportedly sign up their babies at birth, and many of those parents are PlayLab graduates themselves; according to Alfano, PlayLab is now seeing its third generation of participants. The waiting time to become a child tester at PlayLab is often more than two years. To prepare families for their visit to the lab, Fisher-Price issues a professionally produced videotape detailing the experience in store for them. The children who participate in product research at PlayLab are not paid. Company spokespeople say that the excitement of being part of the development process is reward enough for the children and their families. Some PlayLab graduates are selected as unpaid models for photo shoots for Fisher-Price’s toy packaging. “That’s our way of giving back to our community,” according to a public relations assistant.

The Leapfrog Lab generates a similarly exclusive atmosphere. With a database of thousands of families in the Bay Area who have volunteered their children, Gray estimates that roughly three thousand children pass through the LeapFrog Lab every year. As payment, they may receive a gift certificate or a toy, but, as at PlayLab, the chief reward is getting to come at all. Even the most enthusiastic participants are not invited to return, however. Once they grow savvy about answering marketers’ and product designers’ questions they are no longer considered “fresh blood”: children whose perspective is untainted by the market research process. Gray surmises that LeapFrog Lab volunteers — or their parents — may feel that the testing conveys on them some of the distinction of junior inventors or scientists.

LeapFrog Baby also cultivates an air of scientific inquiry, insisting that the toys developed by the Infant and Toddler Division be tied to academic research on very young children, which has boomed in the past decade. In the baby division, learning has more or less been codified by a special document, about which people speak with hushed pride. This document is known as the S&S, short for Scope and Sequence.

Scope and Sequence, a term borrowed from academia, refers to a curriculum plan in which educational objectives and skills are mapped out according to the stages at which they will be taught. At LeapFrog, however, the S&S is jokingly referred to as “the secret weapon”: It is the basis on which the division’s toys are designed. As such, the S&S is guarded with extreme care. Only producers who are given clearance to work on it can access the document on the company’s computer network. Only one hard copy is permitted to circulate internally at any given time; additional printouts are strictly prohibited. When analysts or journalists meet with the Infant and Toddler Division to learn about how LeapFrog applies its distinctive brand of “learning” to toy design for this age group, the producers clutch the well-worn S&S and refer to it by opening the pages gingerly, cupping their hands to keep outsiders from stealing a glance. Producers say that the S&S is kept secret because it contains the key to LeapFrog’s unique competitive advantage in the zero-to-three market. They explain that the S&S is the product of years of data compiled from books, academic journals, and parenting magazines on infant and toddler development, as well as discussions with experts, and thus is grounded in serious research. While competitors may incorporate a general learning lesson into their toys in order to market them effectively to mothers and retail buyers, LeapFrog is able, thanks to the S&S, to design toys that pinpoint specific areas of learning targeted to precise ages.

After assuring themselves that I am not spying for a competitor, the producers grant me a brief chance to examine the S&S. The document, which is constantly being updated is between fifty and one hundred pages in length. Essentially, it is an enormous chart with correspondingly enormous ambition: to catalog every developmental skill from birth to two years. One axis lists a specific age or range (such as six months or six to twelve months); the other axis itemizes the developmental skills associated with that age or range. For example, under the subheading “Memory,” one finds the entry “cognitive mapping” — basically, the ability to remember where things are located — listed as a skill correlating with the age of six months. If these terms sound as though they were lifted from a textbook on early developmental psychology, it is because most of them were. Although most LeapFrog producers are not academics, there is nothing inappropriate about adopting academic terminology to identify developmental milestones to clarify specific phenomena and behavior.

But in many cases the terms used to categorize developmental milestones suggest that little children will be learning academic subjects. For example, according to LeapFrog’s S&S, the twelve-month-old developmental milestones of shape recognition and perception of spatial relations fall under the heading “Geometry.” Also, a single developmental milestone often appears under several headings. Shape recognition, for example, turns up under “Early Reading” as well as “Geometry.” This semantic shift is striking. There is a substantial difference between using academic language for the sake of precision and using it to convey an academic objective. When asked about the rationale behind their choice of language, producers contend that the reasoning is not flawed in any fundamental way. Although it may not be literally accurate to characterize shape recognition as an example of the ability to formulate geometric proofs, they argue, it is legitimate to suggest that by mastering these developmental skills, infants and toddlers are building the foundation for grasping advanced mathematics later on. It seems odd, however, that after identifying developmental skills with such precise academic terms, producers would then shift to loose, bendy language in categorizing them. What’s going on?

THE “LEARNING” LINE

Producers admit that one of the larger purposes of the S&S is to establish a curriculum for infants and toddlers, one that LeapFrog hopes might ultimately serve as a government-sanctioned standard. Since President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which compels public schools to comply with specified academic standards, even state pre-K programs have been obliged to conform to standards published by the states’ departments of education. Teachers and heads of schools must painstakingly comb through book-length guidelines and cross-reference them with their teaching plans to make certain they are in compliance.

At the 2004 annual conference of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), in Anaheim, California, an entire track of speeches and seminars was devoted to complying with standards without sacrificing young children’s developmental need for play. But even as such seminars were under way in the conference rooms, the main exhibit hall was lined with booths of companies marketing prepackaged preschool curricula, reflecting the big business that has bubbled up since passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. Now the standards-based trend is beginning to trickle down to even lower ages. Over the past few years, the daycare industry has begun to feel pressure to offer parents some assurance that their infants and toddlers will be prepared for preschool. LeapFrog spokespeople explain that this situation offers the company a strategic opportunity. Through its School-house Division, LeapFrog already sells LeapPads and other products to kindergartens and elementary schools. If LeapFrog can create and standardize a curriculum for babies and toddlers, the company will be in an excellent position to market products in large volume directly to daycare centers. LeapFrog already has a substantial foothold in the daycare business. Its parent company, Knowledge Learning Corporation — owned by the erstwhile junk-bond trader Michael Milken — completed mergers with the nation’s two largest daycare chains, Children’s World and KinderCare, in 2005. Today the company operates in thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia, with nearly 2,000 daycare centers, over 500 school partnership sites, and more than 120 corporate daycare centers.

The S&S also serves several other functions. Every time a new product goes into prototype, producers check off the skills it supports on the S&S grid. They consult the S&S during brainstorming to see what has been checked off and where the holes are; holes represent opportunities for new products. But before moving forward with a concept based on these holes, producers consult with LeapFrog’s focus-group researchers to find out what mothers have been saying. In the world of the zero- to three-year-old, mom is the primary consumer, and today’s mom is well aware that very young children are far from blank slates, that they are capable of learning a great deal.

However, today’s mom is also wary of fast-tracking her little ones. For example, LeapFrog’s market research department noted that many mothers wanted to start a comforting, nurturing bedtime reading routine with their infants and toddlers. Producers consulted the S&S, and the ensuing marriage of these two varieties of research resulted in the Touch and Tug Discovery Book, an electronic toy that straps on to the side of a crib and can also be detached and used as an “interactive book”; a recorded voice reads stories and, according to the enclosed pamphlet, “When playtime is over, the included soothing music and lullabies are an excellent way to calm baby as he drifts to sleep.”

Mothers also told researchers that they wanted to introduce their children to music, which they knew was important developmentally. But any product linked with classical music — particularly Mozart — would make them feel that they were trying too hard to turn their babies into geniuses. It wouldn’t make learning feel like fun. After consulting the S&S, producers came up with the Learn & Groove Activity Station, which features a rotating plastic disco ball and a toy version of a rap-era turntable — both artifacts of Mom’s own early childhood, when the Bee Gees ruled on radio, and, later, of a Grandmaster Flash–era adolescence.

LeapFrog has learned that “learning” must feel like fun. The company identifies itself as a maker not of “educational” or “developmental” toys but of “learning” toys. While there is only a shade of semantic difference in that distinction, it is a significant difference in marketing terms. Producers and executives at LeapFrog, like their competitors, say that the term “educational” harkens back to the achievement-driven yuppie era of the 1980s, when a child’s every moment was pegged to education as insurance for present and future success. Then children were treated as glum receptacles into which “education” was poured. The present generation of parents responds much more favorably to the term “learning,” which suggests that the child brings her own active agency to the experience rather than having it foisted upon her. To this generation of mothers, “learning” connotes an enjoyable, nurturing, or natural experience unobtrusively infused with some underlying lesson.

Steering clear of the stigma of the ’80s and early ’90s parenting style — that of the Baby Boomers — is very important to LeapFrog. Today’s mothers are put off by anything that overtly smacks of academic fast-tracking. So the S&S has yet another function: mapping the mind of the Generation-X mom. In that capacity the S&S may be one of the company’s most valuable assets.