It is surely coincidence that within days of the Food and Drug Administration banning flavored cigarettes on the grounds that they are dangerously attractive to children, the Disney Corporation should begin offering refunds to parents disgruntled that “Baby Einstein” videos will not, in fact, make their infants smarter.
Well, of course it’s a coincidence; the two events have almost nothing in common. Nothing, that is, apart from the way each speaks to opposing aspects of America’s double-think about dealing with the vulnerabilities of children.
On the one hand, our society insists that children must be hyper-protected at all times. Safety first! Six-year olds are threatened with reform school for bringing pocket knives to class. It’s an act of criminal foolhardiness for a father to lock a child in a parked car, even with the windows cracked, while he runs into the grocery store.
This week I watched customers in a CVS cluck disapprovingly as a European mother cluelessly left her baby a dozen feet away from where she was standing by the cashier. Where did she think she was, Denmark? Doesn’t she know it’s dangerous to leave a baby like that?
On the other hand, American culture is remarkably relaxed about putting children before the flash-and-blare of mass media. Hundreds of thousands of parents think nothing of taking small children to whatever new film is coming out, regardless of whether the images will be frightening or subversive or simply incomprehensible to young minds.
Watching DVDs has become a standard feature of play dates and sleepovers. Facebook is as ubiquitous in unsupervised teen girlhood as video games are in American boyhood.
Meanwhile, regular experience of video and television starts shortly after birth and only gets more intense as children progress to such sophisticated phases as, say, toddlerhood.American children ages 2-5, according to a study released this week by the Nielsen Company, now watch more than 32 hours of television every week. Thirty-two hours!
It’s an odd state of affairs. We require that the outer selves of children be bubble-wrapped and car-seated. Yet we leave their vulnerable inner selves exposed, as it were, on the side of a Hollywood hill, to be shown rapid-cut images chosen for them by strangers.
Now, in protective mode, the revivified Obama-era FDA has banned cigarettes enhanced with exotic flavors “from licorice to grape,” as the Wall Street Journal wryly noted, including the clove cigarettes beloved by Indonesian expats and urban hipsters.
The idea is to prevent American children from stepping through a fragrant gateway to the presumed gateway drug, nicotine. If adults are inconvenienced by the ban, well, that’s just too bad.
Yet for children the gateway to media is wider than ever, whether it’s “Brainy Baby” DVDs or “Teletubbies” on television or the smorgasbord of infant videos, CDs and books from Disney’s Baby Einstein.
Adults who use these products – whether nobly, in the hopes of expanding their child’s aesthetic senses, or ignobly, to get the kid to pipe down – bridle angrily at any suggestion that their babies would be better off without time in front of a screen.
Disney is offering refunds because the science does not back up claims that Baby Einstein “contributes to increased brain capacity” in tiny children (to be fair, many such assertions were made before Disney bought the business in 2001).
Yet the name slyly suggests otherwise, and parents have been only too happy to oblige by buying. It’s not just American children who spend an inordinate amount of time staring at screens, after all.
The refund offer came after years of hounding by Susan Linn, a Harvard instructor and activist who has been trying to do to commercializers of childhood what Ralph Nader did to the Ford Pinto.
“Linn’s moves are carefully crafted to prey on parental guilt and anxiety,” Susan McLain, general manager of Disney’s Baby Einstein brand, writes frostily on the company Web site.
Indeed they do – but pressure wouldn’t work if many parents weren’t already secretly uneasy. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that babies be kept away from all screens, but specialized products salve the consciences of those adults who agree, with Disney, that the idea of keeping under-2s away from the box does not “reflect the reality of today’s parents, families and households.” That would seem uncontroversial, given the recent Nielsen findings, if unspeakably sad.
Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursday.
