Ottawa Citizen
May 11, 2006 Thursday, Pg. A19

I was lucky enough to be visiting a friend at the moment his seven-month-old daughter made an astounding discovery: her knees.

Squealing with glee, she extended her arms to her father, letting him know in no uncertain terms her desire to stand up. As her tiny fists gripped tightly to a finger, she pushed up from her toes and straightened to a standing position.

After a few wobbly, upright moments, she began to squat, bending her legs slowly. Then, like an inebriated ballet dancer rising from a plie, she teetered up once more. Beaming with pride she repeated the sequence again -- and again and again.

Babies are born with an innate drive to love, to learn, and to actively engage in the world. An impressive body of research has established that in the first months and years of life, optimal intellectual, social and emotional development requires direct engagement with the world.

That's why the escalation of allegedly educational electronic media targeted to infants and toddlers is perhaps the most troubling trend in a commercialized culture fraught with troubling trends.

By targeting babies, companies are marketing not just products but lifelong habits, values and behaviors -- hardwiring dependence on media before babies even have a chance to grow and develop and removing them further and further from the very experiences that are essential for healthy development.

While Disney's Baby Einstein, which took in $200 million U.S. last year, might claim that its Baby Wordsworth video will "foster development of your toddler's speech and language," and that Numbers Nursery will "help develop your baby's understanding of what numbers mean," there is absolutely no evidence that screen media are beneficial for babies and toddlers.

And there is mounting evidence that it may be harmful. Research suggests that -- for babies -- TV viewing interferes with cognitive development, language development and regular sleep patterns.

Research also suggests that the more time babies spend in front of TV, the less time they spend engaging in two activities that really do facilitate learning: interacting with parents away from screens, and spending time actively involved in creative play.

Losing -- or never acquiring -- the ability to play may not sound like much until you realize that play is both the foundation of learning and essential to mental health. Initiative, curiosity, active exploration, problem solving and creativity are capacities that develop through play, as are the more ephemeral qualities of self-reflection, empathy, and the ability to find meaning in life.

For older children, hours of television watched are linked to bullying, poor school performance and childhood obesity. A preschooler's risk for obesity increases by six per cent for every hour of TV watched per day. If there's a TV in the child's bedroom, the odds jump an additional 31 per- cent for every hour watched.

Meanwhile, the baby-media industry is booming. In the U.S., according to reports from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 68 per cent of children under two engage with screen media for an average of two hours daily. About half of U.S. parents harbour the erroneous belief that videos are very important to a young child's education.

Last week, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a U.S. consumer advocacy coalition of which I am a founder, filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission against Disney and Brainy Baby for false and deceptive marketing of baby media. A few months ago we challenged the motives of Sesame Workshop, the producers of Sesame Street, who entered the market with a set of DVDs, and accompanying products, for babies. A year ago we took on HBO for claiming that a TV program would help infants learn to love classical music, dance and art.

One of our goals is to stop companies from luring babies to screens by making unfounded claims that their products are educational. We want to encourage parents to follow the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation to keep babies away from screen media.

It's an uphill struggle. Well-funded, ubiquitous marketing campaigns convince parents that screen time is actually good for babies, and only six per cent know about the AAP's recommendation.

Meanwhile, some of my public-health colleagues tell me that there's no point in even trying. Today's overworked, overstressed, under-supported parents don't really want to hear that videos such as Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby are not educational and that screen time may even be harmful. By believing they're beneficial, parents can justify using electronic media to get what may be a much-needed break from hands-on child care.

But parents deserve honest information, not the marketing hype they are getting from baby-media companies. Propping babies in front of screens may initially buy them free time, but it's likely to cost both them and their children later on. Screen media can be habituating.

One worry is that screen-saturated babies will never learn how to soothe or amuse themselves independently. Do we want to raise a generation of children who are either bored or anxious unless they are in front of a screen? That's certainly where the media and marketing industries want them.

Even more than getting babies to love their programs, companies such as Disney and Sesame Workshop use media as a means of getting babies to love the characters they feature -- which inevitably turn up in the grocery or toy store on products parents may or may not want to buy.

Parents have a right to decide how and when to introduce their children to screen media. They also have a right to accurate information about the pros and cons of that choice. If they choose to limit children's media consumption, they will be struggling endlessly against a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Can't we at least help them protect babies? Let's hold media companies responsible for backing up claims embedded in their marketing. Babies have a right to grow up -- and parents have a right to raise them -- without being undermined by commercial interests.

 

Susan Linn, psychologist, award winning producer, writer and puppeteer is Associate Director of the Media Center of the Judge Baker Children’s Center, Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.   She is the author of Consuming Kids:  The Hostile Takeover of Childhood and lectures internationally on the impact of marketing on children.