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But the fact is, the kids don't have to feel so pressured — and neither do their parents. It is true, as the marketers say, that a baby's brain is a fast-changing thing. Far from passively sponging up information, it is busy from birth laying complex webs of neurons that help it grow more sophisticated each day. It takes anywhere from a year to five years, depending on the part of the brain, for this initial explosion of connections to be made, after which many of them shut down and wither away, as the brain decides which it will keep, which new ones it will need and which it can do without. During this period, it's important that babies get the right kinds of stimulation so their brains can make the right decisions. The right kinds of stimulation, however, may not be the ones people think they are.
Asked in a recent study what skills children need in order to be prepared for school, parents of kindergartners routinely cited definable achievements such as knowing numbers, letters, colors and shapes. Teachers, however, disagree. Far more important, they say, are social skills, such as sharing, interacting with others and following instructions. Kids who come to school with a mastery of these less showy abilities stand a better chance of knocking off not only reading and writing when they are eventually presented but everything else that comes along as well. "Intelligence is based on emotional adequacy," says child-development expert T. Berry Brazelton. "The concept of emotional intelligence is at the base of all this."
It may not even be possible to prod children's intellectual growth. As babies' brains weave their neuronal connections, parents may be able to stimulate, say, the visual or musical ones by exposing kids to picture books or CDs, but it is doubtful that these fortify the brain in any meaningful way. "It's a myth that we can accelerate a child's developmental milestones," says Alan Woolf, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital. "Children are kind of preprogrammed to reach those points." Bruer puts it more bluntly: "The idea that you can provide more synapses by stimulating the child more has no basis in science."
One of the greatest sources of misunderstanding surrounds the so-called Mozart effect. For years researchers have found that playing background music can improve the spatial skills of listeners, causing many laymen to conclude that creative skills can be boosted too. Last year Harvard University released a study called Project Zero that analyzed 50 years of research on this idea. The studies showed that college students who had listened to music performed better on paper-and-pencil spatial tests, but the effect lasted no more than 15 minutes and then faded away. There was no evidence that the listening improved brain power or artistic skills, and certainly none that suggested babies could realize any benefit at all.
Many other misconceptions about brain potential can probably be traced to a series of studies in the 1970s showing that young rats raised with access to mazes and toys had more neural connections than those kept in barren cages. Similarly, studies indicate that children raised without sufficient nurturing often suffer from cognitive deficiencies. However, no evidence indicates that a lot of attention, in the form of early and constant stimulation, enhances a child's intellectual growth. According to the current scientific literature, the type and amount of stimulation needed for proper childhood development is already built into the normal life of an average baby. No whizbang tricks are necessary.
Parents might find it easier to believe all this if it weren't for the increasingly fashionable theory of windows of opportunity for learning — the idea that there are comparatively narrow periods when various parts of the brain can be taught various types of skills. What gives the theory special weight is that there is, in fact, a little truth to it — but only very little. When it comes to language — perhaps the most nuanced skill a person can master — the brain does appear to have fertile and less fertile periods. At birth, babies have the potential to learn any language with equal ease, but by six months, they have begun to focus on the one tongue they hear spoken most frequently. Parents can take advantage of this brain plasticity by introducing a second or even third language, but only if they intend to speak them all with equal frequency until the child is fluent. Merely buying the occasional bilingual toy or videotape will teach kids little, and it certainly will not make it easier for children to learn for real when they get to school.
When it comes to other skills, such as math or music, there is virtually no evidence for learning windows at all. Children grasp things at different rates, and parents whose child can read by age 3 may thus conclude that they somehow threaded the teaching needle perfectly, introducing letters and words at just the right time. But the reality is often that they simply got lucky and had a kid who took a shine early on to a particular skill. "People took the notion of a critical period and misunderstood it to apply to all learning," says Dr. Sparrow of Children's Hospital.
So if parents should be putting down the brain toys, what should they be picking up? For one thing, the kids themselves. If interpersonal skills are the true predictors of how well a child will do in school, parents are the best tutors. Experiments reveal that by the time babies are two months old, they are already fluent in the complex language of their parents' faces, and count on them for their sense of well-being. "Think about the human face," says Sparrow, "the wrinkles, the expressions in the eyes — and think about the infant brain being stimulated by that." To believe that even the best video game or toy could replace this kind of learning, Sparrow thinks, misses the point of just what it is babies are truly hungering to know.
Does this mean educational toys are useless? No. Babies are as engaged by pictures as adults are, and exposing them to books or flash cards early — especially black, white and red ones, which are indeed easier for them to perceive — helps them develop their ability to focus and follow, undeniably a form of learning. Babies are as soothed by music as their parents are, and a little Mozart may indeed hold their attention better than something less rich. Beyond that, however, there's a limit to what the products can do — and parents who follow their children's cues quickly learn that. "When our son was little, all he wanted to do was play with us," says Sharon Chantiles, a casting director and the mother of a four-year-old. "I decided to walk away from the fancy toys and invest in him as a child."
What's at stake for parents is far more than simply a child's school transcript or college options; it's a child's spirit. Recently, author David Brooks spent time on the campus of Princeton University getting to know the students, and he published what he learned in a searching article in the Atlantic magazine. The students were thoroughbred products of the American educational system — gifted, disciplined, driven to succeed, with a calm but consuming focus. And, Brooks found, they were curiously flattened too. There was no evidence of the wildfire energy of the college student, no evidence of much moral passion. More troublingly, there was no sign at all of the sweet and fleeting belief that they could try things and fail at them and try other things and discard them until they found something that truly touched and transformed them — and that they could do for the rest of their lives.
It's a high-stakes game letting kids roll the dice with their futures this way, and the risk — indeed the certainty — exists that at least a few of them will fail. But with their parents standing watchfully by, they need to be allowed to try. The more chances kids take, the greater the odds they will come up winners — and the chips they collect if they do can be priceless.