Inside Out | The best head start in life for babies is parental interaction, not spurious educational tools or toys
Scientific American’s advice is simple: “If you must buy educational toy, find one that you want to play with, because the time a baby spends hearing you talk and watching you interact with the world is the best education the baby can get.”
It is not just at Yale, in Singapore or in Hong Kong, that Tiger Mums reign, and fortunes are spent on often-spurious strategies to super-charge your baby towards Harvard or Oxford or Fudan.
Nor is it surprising that marketing products to anxious and besotted parents begins the moment sperm meets egg, including large numbers of snake-oil merchants making claims that range from the unsubstantiated to the preposterous; from foods that make the brain flourish, to educational toys that put your baby Einstein at the top of the class.
Take for instance the company that claims it can teach children of Cantonese-speaking families more than 500 English words and 100 phrases before they reach the age of three. Or articles in parenting magazines about feeding the baby’s brain during pregnancy, or books that sell recipes for brainy kids.
Take the “Babypod”, examined by science writer Erik Vance in this month’s Scientific American, which is among dozens of devices that plays music to your still-unborn child with the aim of giving the fetus a head start: “Our initial hypothesis suggests that music... activates the brain circuits that stimulate language and communications. In other words, learning begins in utero,” Babypod’s website says. And they mean that quite literally: it is a bulb-shaped silicone speaker that is inserted inside a woman’s body.
As Vance observes: “It is true that babies learn while in the womb and that music is enriching to young children. But there is no evidence that music enriches a fetus.”
