"Educational" saturation

This New York Times article, "See Baby Touch a Screen. but Does Baby Get It?" is right in line with conversations I've been having lately.

(Due to login required and future fee-based archiving by NYT, I'll try to include pertinent quotes below.)

NYT focuses specifically on media: video games, computer-based games, and videos. I'd immediately add "educational" television into the mix, but also any of the interactive "learning" toys pitched for infants and beyond. Some of these items are relatively recent crazes; others go back to my own childhood and beyond.

Despite the commercial success, though, a report released yesterday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, "A Teacher in the Living Room? Educational Media for Babies, Toddlers and Pre-schoolers," indicates there is little understanding of how the new media affect young children - and almost no research to support the idea that they are educational.

Parents are asking, and I suppose not unreasonably so, all else being equal, why not have kids playing with "educational" toys and gadgets and watching "educational" shows rather than non-specifically-educational ones?

"I know one leading baby book says, very simply, it's a waste of money. But there's only one thing better than having a baby, and that's having a smart baby. And at the end of the day, what can it hurt?" [says the parent of a wired 11-month-old.]

"There's nothing that shows it helps, but there's nothing that shows it's does harm, either," said Marcia Grimsley, senior producer of "Brainy Baby" videos.

This brings to mind a few questions for me.

Is all else really equal?

Are educational media really better than entertainment media?

The parents and corporations quoted in NYT have already stipulated that there's no proof they're any better, and no research to show that they're really educational. So the best we can do at this point is that they're supposedly not harmful.

Are interactive toys really better than, we'll call them static toys?

Well, they certainly separate parents (and kids) from their money at a higher rate.

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the barrage of interactivity is stifling kids' natural curiosity, creativity, and ability to entertain themselves. My mother's generation honest-to-God played in the yard without toys, for hours, every day. They explored; they improvised with sticks and rocks; they role-played. This had already become unfathomable to me even in my youth.

I've read authors who are concerned that we are raising generations whose drive to consume pre-packaged experiential and sensory products is practically insatiable.

That leads us right into....

Is it true that the interactive and educational versions do no harm?

Depression and other mental illnesses are caused by imbalances in the brain's stimulus and pleasure processing centers. I don't know whether it's true that rates of mental illness among Western youth are really increasing (as opposed to diagnostic tools improving), but it wouldn't be difficult to imagine a link between an unfillable and growing need for external stimulation and pleasure, and a brain's difficulty managing the same.

What about the mysteriously skyrocketing rates of autism, a disorder in which (among other things) kids can't manage sensory inputs?

OK, that's pretty tenuous. I'm not really a member of the "save just one child" school of risk management. But it's an interesting thing to ponder, especially considering how disproportionate the rates of these disorders are in the US compared to the rest of the West, and the West compared to the rest of the world.

Do I even need to mention obesity? No, I didn't think so.

Another angle is the question of whether parents are more likely to use interactive toys and media as a babysitter, and whether such things reduce their investment in personal interaction and directly teaching things to their own kids themselves. I'm cynical, so I definitely suspect that this is happening. If the presence of the "educational" gadgets results in children getting even less of adults' attention, I'd have to call that a harm as well, especially if the gadgets then turn out to have little or no educational benefit....

And finally, although I'd certainly grant that kids should play with toys, is it really inevitable that kids are going to be consuming media extensively? Preschoolers? Toddlers? Infants?

"There are all these babies watching videos, and we wanted to address the reality that's out there and come up with something that is at least appropriate," said Gary Knell, Sesame's president.

"All these babies watching videos"?

So the debate is over, and the Teletubbies won?

Infants and toddlers do not instinctively know how to watch and listen to TV. They're not clamoring to do it... they don't even know what it is, other than a noisy blinking box. (Realizing that a photograph is something different from an oblong piece of paper is considered a developmental milestone.) For them to become viewers of the Teletubbies, someone first has to teach them how to watch.

(Is that why LG never figured out, or cared anything about, her expensive Microsoft "Intellitable"? We didn't train her enough? )

There may or may not be a vast global consipiracy of media and marketers aimed at turning your infant into a TV consumer by appeasing you with "educational benefits". But I think it's undeniable that for well-meaning parents (and infants), this is an unintended consequence.

Does it make any sense for parents to put in time teaching a kid to watch TV so the TV can teach the kid to read, which it may or may not do? What if we cut out the middleman and just taught our kids to read?

I also wonder whether V.Smile and Leapster are more effective at educating, or more effective at training kids how to play video games (and training them to want to)?

These forms of media consumption are not inevitable... but as devices and programming are targeted at younger and younger "markets", parents are participating in making them inevitable.

If we think about it, I wonder, is that really what we want?

"As a society, we are in the middle of a vast uncontrolled experiment on our infants and toddlers growing up in homes saturated with electronic media," Mr. Anderson said.

I guess we'll find out.