Brain Rules for Baby (20 page)

Another example comes from a study that looked at bullying. For each hour of TV watched daily by children under age 4, the risk increased 9 percent that they would engage in bullying behavior by the time they started school. This is poor emotional regulation at work. Even taking into account chicken-or-egg uncertainties, the American Association of Pediatrics estimates that 10 percent to 20 percent of real-life violence can be attributed to exposure to media violence.

TV also poisons attentions spans and the ability to focus, a classic hallmark of executive function. For each additional hour of TV
watched by a child under the age of 3, the likelihood of an attentional problem by age 7 increased by about 10 percent. So, a preschooler who watches three hours of TV per day is 30 percent more likely to have attentional problems than a child who watches no TV.

Just having the TV on while no one is watching—secondhand exposure—seemed to do damage, too, possibly because of distraction. In test laboratories, flashing images and a booming sound track continually diverted children from any activity in which they were otherwise engaged, including that marvelous brain-boosting imaginative play we discussed. The effects were so toxic for kids in diapers that the American Association of Pediatrics issued a recommendation that still stands today:

Current research projects are addressing the potential effect of TV on grades, and preliminary work suggests that it affects both reading scores and language acquisition. But after age 2, the worst effects on kids brains may come because television coaxes kids away from exercise, a subject we will examine when we get to video games.

 

What about all those store shelves lined with educational videos and DVDs? They certainly claim to boost cognitive performance in preschool populations. Such boasts inspired a group of researchers at the University of Washington to do their own studies. I remember reading a series of press releases about their work one sunny
day—unusual for Seattle. At first I laughed out loud, then suddenly I turned sober. The president of our university had just received a phone call from no less than Robert Iger, head of the Disney Company. The mouse was not happy. The UW scientists had just published research testing a product Disney makes, Baby Einstein DVDs, and the results were damning.

This won’t surprise you, given everything we have discussed so far. The products didn’t work at all. They had no positive effect on the vocabularies of the target audience, infants 17 to 24 months. Some did actual harm. For every hour per day the children spent watching certain baby DVDs and videos, the infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them.

Disney demanded a retraction, citing deficiencies in the studies. After consultations with the original researchers, the university held its ground and issued a press release saying so. After this initial flurry of activity, there was silence. Then, two years later, in October 2009, Disney made what amounted to a product recall, offering refunds to anyone who had purchased Baby Einstein materials. Responsibly, the company has dropped the word “educational” from the packaging.

Since the first studies on television, researchers have discovered that not everything about TV is negative. It depends upon the content of the TV show, the age of the child, and perhaps even the child’s genetics.

Before age 2, TV is best avoided completely. But after age 5, the jury is out on this harsh verdict—way out, in fact. Some television shows
improve
brain performance at this age. Not surprisingly, these shows tend to be the interactive types (
Dora the Explorer,
good;
Barney and Friends
, bad, according to certain studies). So, although the case is overwhelming that television exposure should be limited, TV cannot
be painted with a monolithic brush. Here are a few recommendations for TV viewing the data suggest:

 

1. Keep the TV off before the child turns 2. I know this is tough to hear for parents who need a break. If you can’t turn it off—if you haven’t created those social networks that can allow you a rest—at least limit your child’s exposure to TV. We live in the real world, after all, and an irritated, overextended parent can be just as harmful to a child’s development as an annoying purple dinosaur.

 

2. After age 2, help your children choose the shows (and other screen-based exposures) they will experience. Pay special attention to any media that allow intelligent interaction.

 

3. Watch the chosen TV show with your kids, interacting with the media, helping them to analyze and think critically about what they just experienced. And rethink putting a TV in the kids room: Kids with their own TVs score an average of 8 points lower on math and language-arts tests than those in households with TVs in the family room.

First, a disclaimer. I love Myst, an old computer-based video game. I was a graphics artist and professional animator before becoming a scientist, and Myst was love at first byte. Here was this beautifully rendered world, elegantly drawn with digital paint, dripping in what I could only describe as bit-mapped love. I spent hours in this world, exploring, problem solving,
reading
(there are books in this game!), examining star charts, manipulating technologies that were visually inspired by equal parts Leonardo da Vinci, Jules Verne, and Gene Roddenberry. Even now, hearing real waves gently lapping against a shoreline sends me back to the dreamy digital world where I first
learned the real power of computing. If I sound smitten, then I am communicating correctly. That’s dangerous for a scientist, especially one about to comment on video games.

Fortunately, cooler heads are out there; that’s why it’s called refereed literature, after all. What does that literature say about video games and developing brains in babies? There’s not much, and it paints a decidedly mixed picture. This is understandable. The subject is too new, and the technology undergirding it is changing too rapidly. So, what parents of newborns and toddlers should know about gaming comes not from data about what video games do to the mind but from what video games do to the body.

As with television, most video games are consumed in a sedentary position: You sit there. Movement-oriented game consoles such as the Wii, which debuted in 2006, potentially provide an exception, but they seem to have made little dent: Kids weight is still rising precipitously. So pronounced is this weight-gain trend that our children are starting to get diseases usually associated with middle and later life—including arthritis! Childhood obesity is three times more prevalent in gamers than in non-gamers.

This rise in pediatric obesity is painful to hear in the brain science community, especially because we know so much about the relationship between physical activity and mental acuity. Exercise—especially aerobic exercise—is fanastic for the brain, increasing executive function scores anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent. This is true across the life span, from young children to members of the golden-parachute crowd. Strengthening exercises do not give you these numbers (though there are many other reasons to do them).

Parents who start their kids out on a vigorous exercise schedule are more likely to have children for whom exercise becomes a steady, even lifelong, habit (up to 1½ times more, depending upon the study). Fit kids score higher on executive function tests than sedentary
controls, and those scores remain as long as the exercise does. The best results accrue, by the way, if you do the exercises
with
your children. Remember that deferred-imitation business? Encouraging an active lifestyle is one of the best gifts you can give your child. It may mean putting away World of Warcraft, getting off your butt, and providing a good example. This does not make Myst any less beautiful. It simply gives gaming a more nuanced perspective. I still love the genre, always will, but I am increasingly convinced that electronic games should come with a warning label.

How about the Internet and its associated digital communication vassals? Again, real data are few and far between. The little work that’s out there suggests some reason for concern, as illustrated by the following story:

A 9-year-old girl decided to invite five or six of her closest friends to her very first slumber party. The girl’s mother, a sociologist by training, was delighted. She remembered her own childhood sleepovers, and she anticipated nonstop talking, pillow fights, whispering secrets in the dark, and giggles at 2 a.m. That never happened. As her daughter’s friends gathered together, Mom immediately noticed things that set her sociologist’s Spidey instincts tingling. The discourse between the girls seemed not like that of typical 9-year-olds, whose social exchanges can be surprisingly sophisticated, but more emotionally immature, like that of 4-year-olds. The culprit appeared to be the girls consistent misreading and misinterpreting of each other’s nonverbal cues. Mom also saw that within 30 minutes of the start of the party, five of the six girls had pulled out their cell phones. They were busily texting friends who weren’t there, taking pictures and sending them off. This continued throughout the day. Deep into the night, around 2 a.m., everything was absolutely still. Mom snuck upstairs to make sure everything was OK. Half the girls had gone to sleep. The other
half were still on their cell phones, little screens glowing underneath the sheets.

Could the text messaging be related to the social immaturity? It’s not a trivial issue. The average youngster in 2008 sent and received 2,272 texts per month, about 80 a day. By 2009, 27 percent of the words they encountered came directly from a computer.

Anything wrong with that? Nobody really knows yet. What we can say has to do with the inherent nature of the medium itself. The Internet and associated media encourage private consumption. This leads to the odd condition, as the slumber party illustrates, that even when we’re together, we’re often far apart. Unless all of their digital interactions involve a video camera, kids won’t get much practice interpreting nonverbal cues. That’s the world autistic kids live in, by the way.

Perfecting nonverbal communication skills takes years of practice, and, as we discussed in the previous chapter, it’s critical that kids do it. Real-life experiences are much messier than life on the Internet and not at all anonymous. Flesh-and-blood people touch each other, get in each other’s way, constantly telegraph information to each other in a fashion not easily reformatted into emoticons and cute three-letter abbreviations. Recall that from marriages to workplaces, the largest source of conflict comes from the asymmetry between extrospective and introspective information. A great deal of asymmetry can be averted through the correct interpretation of nonverbal cues. The less practice humans get at it, the more immature their social interactions are likely to be, which has implications ranging from future divorce rates to erosion of productivity in the workforce.

The sociologist mom’s anecdotal observation may be a wake-up call. It is certainly fertile ground for research. Given what’s at stake, a healthy skepticism toward a digital-only world is probably best. The best current advice may be keeping those machines mostly in the off position for as long as you can.

For better or for worse, we are social animals. It is probably wired into our DNA. You don’t have to look much further than Theodore Roosevelt to see that human relationships are the number one ingredient for a child’s future success. A culture marinated in technology might readily accuse researchers of being on the wrong side of history. The researchers, in turn, might accuse culture of being on the wrong side of humanity.

I recently overheard this half of a cell-phone conversation while waiting for my plane to take off: “Is Stephanie walking yet? No? Brandon was walking by the time he was 9 months! Then later: “Stephanie’s still in diapers? Brandon was potty-trained before he was 2!” The conversation went on and on about various milestones Superbaby Brandon was accomplishing in the face of Pathetic Stephanie.

I hear versions of this baby competition virtually everywhere I go. They’re an element of hyper-parenting—another ingredient you want to limit in your smart-baby fertilizer. As the conversation ended, I imagined what Stephanie’s mom might feel. Anger? Embarrassment? She may have gone out and bought every developmental toy out there to hasten her little girl’s development. Or she may have just cried. And all for no good reason.

Creating comparisons like these is not only counterproductive but out of step with current neuroscientific understanding. It also puts pressure on a child that can be harmful to his or her brain.

As you know by now, the brain follows a developmental timetable that is as individual as its owner’s personality. Children do not go through the same developmental milestones in lock step, marching like little brain-soldiers on the path to their future. A child who is a math whiz at age 4 is not necessarily one at age 9. Einstein, arguably
as bright as they come, is rumored not to have spoken in complete sentences until he was 3 (his first words are alleged to have been “The soup is too hot”). This individuality is partially genetic, but it also occurs because neurons are so responsive to the outer environment. They easily form new connections and break off existing ones, a property known as neuroplasticity.