Some Coos, Babble in the Making of a Superbaby
Should fetuses be conditioned with tapes of music and parents’ voices so they can arrive in this world with their educations already under way?
Or should they basically be left to their own educational devices so they won’t be robbed of the experience of learning things for themselves?
The superbaby controversy continues along with the baby boomlet of the ‘80s. And whether this is a desirable trend or just the result of yuppiedom run amok, the superbaby phenomenon is gathering increasing attention--not to mention a few, rather amazing gadgets.
Consider, for instance, the Prega-phone, displayed over the weekend at the third annual Babyfair for about 25,000 visitors to the L.A. Convention Center.
Oversize Stethoscope
The Prega-phone resembles an oversize stethoscope, except that instead of earpieces it features a mouthpiece, for transferring sound directly to the belly of a pregnant woman.
“Talk to your baby . . . before it’s born! . . . Always speak softly. . . . Tell the baby who you are. . . . Whisper the endearing words you know your baby wants to hear. . . . Recite poetry. . . . Read your favorite stories. . . . Sing nursery rhymes and lullabies. . . . Gently play soothing music. . . . Offer words of encouragement as delivery time nears,” read the instructions on this fetus communication contraption, recently introduced by Prega-phone Inc. of Santa Barbara.
What difference can conversing with a fetus make?
According to Susan K. Golant, a speaker on one of Babyfair’s panels, studies have shown that fetuses indeed respond to auditory stimulation.
With Susan Ludington-Hoe, Golant co-authored “How to Have a Smarter Baby” (Rawson Associates), a book in which the two contend that “Messages come into your fetus’s brain from his developing senses and make synapses with other nerve cells within the brain. . . . Studies have charted changes in fetal EEG brain-wave patterns after the sixth month of pregnancy as a result of stimulation.”
While Golant and Ludington-Hoe don’t sell Prega-phones, they do recommend making audiotapes of parental voices and music, then attaching stereo headphone earpieces to a pregnant woman’s abdomen and playing the tape repeatedly in latter stages of pregnancy.
But, as Golant told a group of parents and observers gathered for a panel on toy selection, the point of “How to Have a Smarter Baby” is not “creating superbabies . . . the point is having well-loved babies.”
Asked to comment on the book jacket’s claims that readers could learn how to “start 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,” Golant said the jacket had been prepared by the publisher and was “somewhat misleading.” Nonetheless, she maintained that the book’s assorted techniques for enhancing infant development were valid and based on accepted research studies.
On the other hand, Burton L. White, author of “The First Three Years of Life” (Prentice Hall Press), argued that such programs and devices are unnecessary and that all an infant or young child needs for good development is “a human being who’s crazy about the child and spends a lot of time with them.”
White offered a list of what he considered the best toys, even though he emphasized that “usually you don’t need toys for the learning process to go well. So far there is not a single toy that anybody has ever determined to have any teaching power.”
White likes toys like books with stiff pages, balls and bath playthings. And he clearly thinks fancier is not automatically better: “If you don’t want to spend the money for bath toys, you can get plastic cups and let them pour the water back and forth.”
He strongly warned against thinking of such things as educational, though he allowed “it’s probably a good idea to tell a kid stories and give them picture books but even these obvious things have never been studied.”
Instead, he said, the value of toys is “90% fun.”
The educator was particularly critical of toys or child development aids that promise specific results. He said he would like to see everyone who’s manufacturing such goods “stop making promises of anything but fun. Whenever anybody who’s offering a toy for sale can prove there’s developmental gain, then they can promise.”
While there were obvious areas of disagreement in the approaches of White and those of Golant (and Ludington-Hoe), neither author was willing to publicly debate. As Golant explained: “I wasn’t going to argue with him. Since I’m not the professor (Ludington-Hoe is an assistant professor at the UCLA School of Nursing), I’m a little bit out of my league.”
Privately, however, White did not hesitate to say he thought the smarter-baby notions of Ludington-Hoe and Golant were “baloney . . . a typical case of people who know a little bit going beyond their competence.”
Despite the fact that Ludington-Hoe and Golant based their recommendations for increasing fetal and infant stimulation on published research, White said he felt such research is “not good enough . . . (the research) needs to be consistent with the work of other papers and the most important work in the field.”
For anyone disappointed that White and Golant did not debate superbaby issues more vigorously, there was little consolation on another panel in which White appeared with a former Montessori teacher who had taught her child to recognize 35 words by the time he was 5 1/2 months old. The baby was repeatedly shown the words on flashcards and told what they said.
Gloria Cliffords indicated she would then ask her baby, “Which one (card) says ‘mommy?’ ” and the infant would knock the correct flashcard off the table.
“Whenever print is large enough, babies can distinguish words,” Cliffords, founder of Baby Power, explained.
Once again, White avoided public disagreement. But in his book, he made it clear that he believes such “forced teaching” is a bad idea.
“All healthy . . . children learn naturally,” he wrote. “ . . . They have an intense desire to master their bodies and an equally intense interest in learning about the people around whom their day revolves. Indeed, they have a full natural agenda. . . . To add to the natural learning needs of the child a pattern of forced teaching, is, in my opinion, inadvisable.”
