Present Tense: Readers of this column under the age of two may be aware of the Baby Einstein series of DVDs and books. Aimed at the developmental advancement of a child it includes such products as Baby Van Gogh, in which a character called Vincent Can Goat uses painting to help teach kids about colours, before using a toddler's plastic spoon to hack off his ear in a fit of tortured pique.
I may have made the last bit up. Others in the series include Baby Wordsworth (words), Baby Newton (shapes) and Baby MacDonald (animals, plants and maximising the potential of set-aside land).
Now owned by Disney, the Baby Einstein range leads a billion-dollar industry aimed at kids whose ages have yet to reach single figures. Or more correctly, aimed at their parents. Similar companies, such as Brainy Baby and Brilliant Baby, exploit that fault line in every parent's confidence, the one at which the belief that their darling son is a budding genius grinds against the fear that he will grow up to set new records in the field of serial killing.
As justification, they cite research that has shown how children's brains do most of their growing before they ever get to school. Do you want your child to be a Baby Mozart or a Baby Manson, they simply. Get in there early or it might be too late. If you don't, then it's probably best to just move on to the next child.
This is an industry that doesn't even have the patience to wait for the child to be born. Many Irish mothers will have played specially-marketed "Mozart Effect" classical CDs to their bumps in the
hope that the child would pop its head into the world having spent the previous nine months perfecting a cure for cancer. That has been taken a stage further by the BabyPlus system ("Because every child
deserves giftedness," says its creator). Here a speaker is strapped to the bump, and it pulses in a manner claiming to enhance "pre-natal education". There's surely not much further this pre-natal education can go, unless it is suggested that for the moment of conception parents get jiggy with it under
a Sunflowers duvet cover.
In the US, the Baby Einstein model has been adapted by Team Baby, DVDs that help parents to raise toddlers who support their favourite football team. For instance, Notre Dame's Baby Irish DVD ("Raising tomorrow's Notre Dame fan today!") features kids yelling "Go Irish" in a cutesy
way while learning all about colours - as long those colours are limited to those of the Notre Dame kit.
Given the limits of GAA fandom - in which a person is lumbered with their county of birth - it's unlikely to find success in Ireland. Depending on where they are from, most two-year-old kids already know such phrases as "Up the Deise!" and "Ah Jaysus, Westmeath!" There's also BabyFirst TV, a 24-hour
station (understandable given that your kid will be too wired from watching educational DVDs to get to sleep) whose schedule includes such cloying titles as So Smart. After the watershed one presumes that
its programming is for a more mature audience, perhaps with warnings that "the following programme contains scenes of lions and tigers".
Growing at a feverish pace, the infant "edutainment" business is stirring debate, much of it centred on conflicting claims over the educational benefits of plonking your kid in front of the telly, regardless of whether the programme their watching is supposed to be good for them or not. The Mozart Effect grew out of a study claiming to prove that college students'
test scores improve under the influence of classical music - but subsequent attempts to replicate the tests have failed.
Meanwhile, the likes of Baby Einstein have developed their techniques on the notion that if Romanian orphans shrivelled under the lack of stimuli, then children will blossom when really blasted
with lights and colours. But other studies show that watching a TV presenter talking about colours is far
less effective than watching a real human.
And the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests, rather strictly, that children under the age of two watch no television at all. All this conflicting information presents a scenario in which Baby Einstein and its kind groom kids with short attentions, but who are at least able to throw together a quick masterpiece before they get bored.
"Want proof?" asked Classic FM's Mozart for Babies. "Well, we know one baby who listened to the music on this CD all through his early, formative years and he grew up to be a genius. His name? Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart." As for Albert Einstein, he didn't talk until he was three. It is said that when he was first introduced to his baby sister he asked, "where are the wheels?" Just imagine what he could have achieved if he had had a decent pre-natal education. I
blame the parents.
