Buy, Buy Baby: How Big Business Captures the Ultimate Consumer – Your Baby or Toddler. Susan Thomas Gregory
of her product rather than herself. She had, without a doubt, deliberately walked out into the field on a rainy day, but she hadn’t known that the weather patterns that afternoon would make it the rainy day. Furthermore, finding a sequel to Baby Einstein misses the point. Its impact has been so profound that it is hard to discern where the product ends and the culture of early childhood in America now begins.
ALLEGIANCE TO A BRAND
Baby Einstein and the raft of imitators it spawned helped transform the culture by addressing a seemingly simple issue. As People magazine wrote in 2000, in a piece marveling at the self-made millionaire mom, “It’s one of life’s great mysteries: How did parents of toddlers eat dinner in peace before videos? Julie Aigner-Clark, thirty-three, founder of the Baby Einstein Company, can’t answer that — but she has helped moms and dads feel less guilty about their VCR habit.” It is remarkable to think of it today, but Aigner-Clark was the first person to broker the merger of what now seem like two relatively obvious ideas: that a video or TV program can be a good baby toy and that a well-designed toy might boost a baby’s brain power. In a decade, this convergence has, perhaps permanently, transformed the everyday experiences of all but the most insulated American children between the ages of zero and three.
This merger has caused a major shift in the child-rearing style and core beliefs of the majority of American parents, cutting across social and economic boundaries. It is not just that more babies and toddlers watch TV, videos, and DVDs, though they certainly do. It is estimated that nearly 30 percent of American homes in which young children live own a Baby Einstein video. According to Disney market research, Baby Einstein has 82 percent brand awareness. Three out of four pregnant women say they are “likely to buy Baby Einstein products.” In a groundbreaking 2003 study of the media habits of America’s children under six, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reported that more than half of the parents surveyed believed that educational TV and baby videos such as those produced by Baby Einstein were “very important” to their babies’ intellectual development. President George W. Bush underscored this widely held conviction in his 2007 State of the Union address, commending Aigner-Clark for “represent[ing] the great enterprising spirit of America.” Perhaps because of the belief that a video can raise their babies’ IQ, or can at least be “educational,” more than a quarter of American children under the age of two have a television in their room, in spite of an appeal by the American Academy of Pediatrics that children under two not watch television at all. On a typical day, 61 percent of children six months to twenty-three months watch television; by age three, 88 percent do. The median time that children from zero to three spend watching some form of media on the screen is slightly under two hours — about as much time as they spend playing outside and about three times as much time as they spend being read to.
What might be called the baby genius phenomenon — the widely held notion that infants and toddlers can be made smarter via exposure to the right products and programs — has spread throughout the toy industry. Today, to be competitive in the baby and toddler business, a toymaker’s products must encourage “learning,” or at least claim that they do. The fastest-growing segment of the $3.2 billion infant and preschool toy business is represented by “educational” products, which are advertised as stimulating babies’ and toddlers’ cognitive abilities. Indeed, the demand for such playthings has completely transformed the toy industry. It has helped catapult dot-com-era start-ups such as LeapFrog into the major leagues and drastically shifted the business strategies of longtime players such as Mattel’s Fisher-Price and Hasbro’s PlaySkool. Wholesale buyers, who follow no educational guidelines in their decisions, are governed only by how they believe customers will respond to packaging claims. It is now standard for anyone marketing to very young children and their families to make certain that his product — and brand — wears what the kids’ marketing executive called an educational “halo.” As he said at Oceana, if you can get educational credit, you can pretty much get away with anything.
The end game is getting a customer. Just two years after Baby Einstein’s launch, network and cable television began to produce shows for toddlers because they saw a chance to hook kids to their channels early on. Asked why so many cable channels were diving into the preschool market, Nick Jr.’s top executive, Brown Johnson, said, “It’s about building allegiance to a brand.”
KGOY
This book looks at the development of what has become the youngest segment in American youth culture. This is not a culture, clearly, that babies and toddlers invented, but rather one constructed by parents, child-care providers, television, and marketers. The effects of this culture on young children are surprising, sometimes shocking, and profound — though academic and marketing researchers alike are only beginning to understand just how deeply the effects run, or even precisely what they are. They are rarely what they seem. To some extent, this is an examination of what marketers call “age compression” or KGOY. Although the nuances are slightly different — the first implies that adults apply the force, the second shrugs that kids getting older younger is an inevitable consequence of living in our times — they both refer to the fact that today’s grade-school children are dealt with the way teenagers were ten or more years ago, and so on down the age scale. Both phenomena, which date back at least to the 1920s in the United States, have been consciously manufactured and maintained by marketers. Since the beginnings of what is generally considered the American youth culture — that point where the media and children’s public lives intersect — KGOY has been a source of parental alarm as well as a business opportunity. Parents have always rebelled against the commercialization of their children initially, but over time they, the children, and, ultimately, American society, internalize the new standard of KGOY as the social norm. Anyone on its periphery is considered quaint, odd, or rigid. KGOY is the ever-changing heart of American youth culture.
KGOY takes on a different meaning when applied to babies, however. Whereas even slightly older children may not feel as old as they act, or are called on to act by a variety of forces, all but the most cloistered have some cultural frame of reference for what the KGOY performance might look like. Babies and toddlers do not. Babies and toddlers are not little kids; they do not think like little kids. The developmental gap between an eighteen-month-old and a four-year-old is as wide a gap as exists in human development; indeed, a teenage girl has more in common, cognitively speaking, with an elderly man than a toddler does with a four-year-old. Babies and toddlers have no prior experience of the world; as the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget first showed in the 1920s, the picture of the world they are working to assemble is categorically different from older children’s, and certainly from adults’. As research is showing, babies and toddlers are astonishingly concrete thinkers. What they may seem to be learning from the stimuli and experiences they encounter in the new baby culture is very different from what they are actually learning.
This book also looks at the important social and historical forces that converged to create the new baby culture. The rise of the child-rearing expert in the United States, the “professionalizing” of motherhood, drastic changes in material culture and work-family patterns in the 1970s, and the vastly different childhoods and parenting styles of Baby Boomers and Generation Xers have all contributed to the formation of today’s zero-to-three market. Toddler TV may have been the tipping point, but momentum had been building for as long as a century.
PROBLEM-SOLVING DEFICIT DISORDER
Still, in the past decade something unique, and uniquely concerning, has been unfolding with the past decade’s development of a baby and toddler market. For one, the long-term impact of the baby genius phenomenon may be anything but educational. Many in the field of early child development suspect that babies and toddlers reared on TV, videos, and blinking, beeping “smart” toys may ultimately suffer from cognitive problems. Diane E. Levin, a professor in the early childhood education department at Wheelock College in Boston, calls the phenomenon “problem-solving deficit disorder.” Levin contends that such products essentially overstimulate very young children, so that instead of using their own resources to solve a problem or an uncomfortable feeling — Mom is in the shower, boredom, and so on — they apply those resources to processing the dazzling object that has been placed before them. Over time, Levin says, babies and toddlers accustomed to getting this kind of sensory “hit” when they feel uncomfortable