NurtureShock (27 page)

One more factor that contributes to children’s aggression needs to be mentioned.

Dr. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan did a study of parenting styles, and how they relate to aggressiveness and acting out at school.
The fathers in her study fell into three camps—the Progressive Dads, the Traditional Dads, and the Disengaged Dads.

We might expect that the Progressive Dads would smoke their competition. No longer inhibited by gender roles, and very involved
in child rearing from the moment of birth, Progressive Dads are regularly shown in the research to be an almost universally
good phenomenon. Children of these coparenting fathers have better sibling relationships, feel good about themselves, and
do better academically.

And at first, in Schoppe-Sullivan’s study, the Progressive Dads far outshone the other two groups. In the lab, they were more
engaged with both spouses and kids. At home, they shared responsibility for the children. While the Traditional Dads were
involved parents, their involvement was usually at their wives’ direction. The Progressive Dads, on the other hand, were adept
parents on their own. These dads figured out what the kid should be wearing for school and the rest of the morning routine
and then put the child to bed. They played more with the kids, and they were more supportive when they did so. They were just
as likely as the moms to stay home from work if the kid was sick.

However, Schoppe-Sullivan was surprised to discover that the Progressive Dads had poorer marital quality and rated their family
functioning lower than the fathers in couples who took on traditional roles. Their greater involvement may have lead to increased
conflict over parenting practices—which in turn would affect their kids.

At the same time, the Progressive Dad was inconsistent in what forms of discipline he ultimately used: he wasn’t as strong
at establishing rules or enforcing them. Extrapolating from earlier research showing that fathers often doubt their ability
to effectively discipline a child, Sullivan has hypothesized that the Progressive Dad may know how
not
to discipline a child (i.e., hit the kid, scream), but he doesn’t know what to do instead. Indeed, the whole idea that he
would actually need to discipline a child—that the kid hasn’t simply modeled the father’s warm, compassionate ways—may throw
him for a loop. Moreover, he finds punishing his kid acutely embarrassing. Therefore, one day it’d be no dessert; the next
day the silent treatment; the third it would be a threat of no allowance if the infraction happened again; the fourth it’d
be psychological criticism meant to induce guilt. He’s always trying something new, and caving at the wrong time.

This inconsistency and permissiveness led to a surprising result in Sullivan’s study: the children of Progressive Dads were
aggressive and acted out in school nearly as much as the kids with fathers who were distant and disengaged.

There’s an old word in the Oxford English Dictionary that means “one skilled in the rearing of children.” The word is pedotrophist.
We sometimes assume that today’s progressive coparents who can set up a portable crib in sixty seconds and can change a diaper
one-handed are the contemporary pedotrophists.

But at least in one dimension, the progressive parent appears to come with a natural weakness.

Despite scientists’ admonitions, parents still spend billions every year on gimmicks and videos, hoping to jump-start infants’
language skills. What’s the right way to accomplish this goal?

I
n November 2007, a media firestorm erupted.

The preeminent journal
Pediatrics
published a report out of the University of Washington: infants who watched so-called “baby videos” had a quantifiably smaller
vocabulary than those who had not watched the videos. With sales of baby videos estimated to be as high as $4.8 billion annually,
the industry went on red alert.

Robert A. Iger, Chief Executive Officer of Disney—which owns the Baby Einstein brand—took the unusual step of publicly disparaging
the scholars’ work, describing their findings as “doubtful” and the study methodology as “poorly done.” He complained the
university statement in support of the study was “reckless” and “totally irresponsible.”

Parents, many of whom had these DVDs on their shelves, were similarly disbelieving. One of the big reasons for their skepticism
was an inexplicably wacky result within the study. According to the data, almost all other kinds of television and movies
infants were exposed to—from Disney’s own
The Little Mermaid
to
American Idol
—were fine for kids. It was baby DVDs—and only baby DVDs—to watch out for. Iger described the findings as nothing less than
“absurd.”

How could these DVDs, beloved by infants around the world, possibly be bad for them?

The report was actually a follow-up to an earlier study the researchers had done to examine if parents used the television
as an electronic babysitter. Most academics had assumed that was true—parents were parking the kids in front of a video while
they went to make a phone call or cook dinner—but no one had tried to find out if there was a basis to the hypothesis.

In that study, parents did confirm that some babysitting was going on, but the main reason infants were watching television—especially
videos such as those in the Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby series—was because parents believed the programs would give their
children a cognitive advantage.

“We had parents with kids in front of the TV for as many as twenty hours a week ‘for their brain development,’ ” recalled
Dr. Andrew Meltzoff, one of the authors of both studies. “Parents told us that they couldn’t provide much for their children,
and that troubled them, so they had saved up and bought the videos hoping that would make up for everything else. Then they
had faithfully strapped their kids into place to watch for four to six hours a week. They said they thought that was the best
thing they could do for their babies.”

Moved by parents’ dramatic efforts to shore up their children’s intellectual development, the scholars conducted the second
study—in order to quantify the actual impact of such television exposure.

The research team called hundreds of families in Washington and Minnesota, asking parents to report the amount of television
their children were watching, by each type of program. Then, they had the parents complete what’s known as the MacArthur Communicative
Development Inventory. Quite simply, the CDI is a list of 89 common words infants may know, and, if they are old enough, say
themselves. The words represent a range of vocabulary sophistication, from “cup” and “push” to “fast” and “radio.” The CDI
is an internationally accepted measure of early language—translated versions of it are used around the world.

Analyzing the data, the scholars found a dose-response relationship, meaning the more the children watched, the worse their
vocabulary. If infants watched the shows one hour per day, they knew 6 to 8 fewer of the 89 CDI words than infants who did
not watch any baby DVDs. That might not sound like a big deficit, but consider that the average eleven-month-old boy recognizes
only 16 of the CDI words in the first place. Understanding 6 fewer of the CDI words would drop him from the 50th percentile
to the 35th.

The results couldn’t have been further from the statements made in the very first press release from Baby Einstein, in March
1997:

Studies show that if these neurons are not used, they may die. Through exposure to phonemes in seven languages, Baby Einstein
contributes to increased brain capacity.

Baby Einstein creator Julie Aigner-Clark specifically credited one professor, Dr. Patricia Kuhl, as the inspiration for much
of the video’s content. In an interview, Aigner-Clark explained, “After reading some of the research by Patricia Kuhl of the
University of Washington, I decided to make the auditory portion of the video multilingual, with mothers from seven different
countries reciting nursery rhymes and counting in their native languages.”

Kuhl and other scholars had determined that, at birth, babies are sensitive to any language’s phonemes—unique sound combinations
that make up a word. (Each language has about 40 phonemes, such as “kuh” or “ch.”) Once babies are around six to nine months
old, they gradually lose that generalist sensitivity. Their brains become specialized, trained to recognize the phonemes of
the language (or languages) they hear most. Kuhl describes this process as becoming “neurally committed” to a language. Commonly-used
neural pathways in the brain strengthen, while unused pathways weaken.

Aigner-Clark’s hope was that her audio track would train children’s brains to recognize phonemes in a wide assortment of languages—essentially,
preventing neural specialization. Hearing these languages early in life would allow them to learn multiple foreign languages
later.

Back in 1997, Aigner-Clark’s product seemed to piggyback on Kuhl’s research. But that’s quite ironic, because in the years
since, Patricia Kuhl’s ongoing findings have helped explain why baby DVDs
don’t
work.

First, in a longitudinal study, Kuhl showed that neural commitment to a primary language isn’t a bad thing. The more “committed”
a baby’s brain is, at nine months old, the more advanced his language will be at three years old. With a weaker connection,
children don’t progress as quickly, and this seems to have lasting impact.

Second, Kuhl went on to discover that babies’ brains do not learn to recognize foreign-language phonemes off a videotape or
audiotape—at all. They absolutely do learn from a live, human teacher. In fact, babies’ brains are so sensitive to live human
speech that Kuhl was able to train American babies to recognize Mandarin phonemes (which they’d never heard before) from just
twelve sessions with her Chinese graduate students, who sat in front of the kids for twenty minutes each session, playing
with them while speaking in Mandarin. By the end of the month, three sessions per week, those babies’ brains were virtually
as good at recognizing Mandarin phonemes as the brains of native-born Chinese infants who’d been hearing Mandarin their entire
young lives.

But when Kuhl put American infants in front of a videotape or audio recording of Mandarin speech, the infants’ brains absorbed
none of it. They might as well have heard meaningless noise. This was true
despite
seeming to be quite engaged by the videos. Kuhl concluded: “The more complex aspects of language, such as phonetics and grammar,
are not acquired from TV exposure.”

By implication, we can conclude that baby DVDs
don’t
delay neural commitment; rather, they have virtually no effect on auditory processing.

The irony here only deepens. One might have noticed that all of these scholars are at the University of Washington. Kuhl and
Meltzoff are Co-Directors of the same lab. So when Disney CEO Iger attacked the
Pediatrics
scholars, he was attacking the very laboratory and institution that Baby Einstein had hailed, when its Language Nursery DVD
was first released.

So why does an infant need a live human speaker to learn language from? Why are babies learning nothing from the audio track
of a baby DVD, while their language isn’t impaired by exposure to regular TV?

The evidence suggests one factor is that baby DVDs rely on disembodied audio voice-overs, unrelated to the abstract imagery
of the video track. Meanwhile, grown-up television shows live actors, usually close up—kids can see their faces as they talk.
Studies have repeatedly shown that seeing a person’s face makes a huge difference.

Babies learn to decipher speech partly by lip-reading: they watch how people move their lips and mouths to produce sounds.
One of the first things that babies must learn—before they can comprehend any word meanings—is when one word ends and another
begins. Without segmentation, an adult’s words probably sound about the same to an infant as does his own babbling. At 7.5
months, babies can segment the speech of people they see speaking. However, if the babies hear speech while looking at an
abstract shape, instead of a face, they can’t segment the sounds: the speech once again is just endless gibberish. (Even for
adults, seeing someone’s lips as he speaks is the equivalent of a 20-decibel increase in volume.)

When a child sees someone speak and hears his voice, there are two sensory draws—two simultaneous events both telling the
child to pay attention to this single object of interest—this moment of human interaction. The result is that the infant is
more focused, remembers the event, and learns more. Contrast that to the disconnected voice-overs and images of the baby videos.
The sensory inputs don’t build on each other. Instead, they compete.

Would baby DVDs work better if they showed human faces speaking? Possibly. But there’s another reason—a more powerful reason—why
language learning can’t be left to DVDs. Video programming can’t interact with the baby, responding to the sounds she makes.
Why this is so important requires careful explanation.