Of course, while the teacher was a native speaker, my classmates and I were so awful that it may have served as a bad influence. She heard too much mangled Spanish in infancy to master it in later years.

Didn’t think anything of it, until she took Spanish in high school, and became fairly fluent at it quite quickly.

I doubt that prenatal exposure will be fruitful, but, early exposure (in the preschool days) has been shown to be beneficial in learning a foreign language.

“What on earth could be accomplished by giving this kind of “knowledge” to a 5-year-old?”

Similarly, I’ve long wondered … what on earth could be accomplished by things like “ALC’s Angel Course … originally designed for Japanese unborn babies and babies to develop their English listening ability”?

http://blog.alc.co.jp/blog/2000660/archive/category/757

ALC finally pulled this thing off the market. I can’t believe they were selling prenatal English with a straight face.

Meanwhile, in Korea:

http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200705/200705020009.html

Kim Sun-jung, in the sixth week of her pregnancy, starts the day by reading an English children’s book. She takes online English lectures for “prenatal education” and goes to English-language worship on Sunday. “I do this for my baby. People say if children are exposed to English earlier, they can learn it more easily.”

In Korea, English-language education begins even before children are born: one online service for prenatal English education has gathered more than 50,000 subscribers over the last two years.

I wonder what Mom would do if confronted with Bernoulli’s equation… on a flash card.

MOM: What makes an airplane fly?
GIRL: Buh..buh..
MOM: That’s right, Bernoulli’s principle!

What on earth could be accomplished by giving this kind of “knowledge” to a 5-year-old? Knowing the *name* tells you nothing whatsoever about how the plane actually flies…it would have been more useful to something like say “the wind blows under the wings and holds the plane up,” even if this is not 100% correct, it at least gives you *some* idea what is going on. The “Bernoulli’s principle” explanation is like medieval schoolmen who said morphine makes you sleepy because it contains a “dormative principle.”

These flash cards strike as a similar kind of thing.

Once you have a baby, you can bend every effort to maximize his potential.

There have been several fad eras, most notably the “better baby” or “superbaby” courses, of which the most famous (or notorious) is Glenn Doman’s Better Baby Institute, now (still!) doing business as the The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. I’m not linking to them, You go look if you want. Doman makes a great many claims, but none have been investigated or confirmed by research.

There are those that are militating against the “superbaby” syndrome: One is a pediatrician, Dr.Lawrence Kutner, who asks parents to :

Some unscrupulous people try to exploit the natural insecurities and desires of new parents. They’ll promise to turn your child into a prodigy if you’ll just buy their program or products and do exactly what they say.

Dr. Spock wrote about the superbaby syndrome; his essay was later updated by Robert Needlman. Both warned against superbabyism:

The discovery that so much important brain development occurs in the early years has led some parents to try to create superbabies–through relentless stimulation and education, starting right after birth… Yet the best experiences for an infant appear to be those she inherently enjoys–those that are rich with love and caring and security, and those that make sense to her.

From the suspect classes, such as the Better Baby Institute, an idea has spread. Today if you walk into any children’s emporium–Toys R Us, say, you can find hundreds of products marketed to parents of infants and toddlers promise to promote intellectual development, from toys (black and white objects that will stimulate your newborn!) to videos to heighten your baby’s intelligence, as the Baby Einstein and Baby Genius lines seem to promise. Baby Einstein, since being purchased by Disney, has had a huge penetration into the households-with-kids market.

At the end of 2002, about 30% of households with children under four own at least one of the Baby Einstein brand videos. It is a robust moneymaker for the Disney label.

The question is, however, are videos a responsible product for children under 24 months of age? The American Academy of Pediatrics hasn’t thought so since 1999, asking pediatriciants to:

Discourage television viewing for children younger than 2 years, and encourage more interactive activities that will promote proper brain development, such as talking, playing, singing, and reading together.

In October, 2003, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a study, Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers:

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under two not watch any television, and that all children over two be limited to one to two hours of educational screen media a day. Despite these recommendations, in a typical day, 68% of all children under two use screen media (59% watch TV, 42% watch a video or DVD, 5% use a computer and 3% play video games), and these youngsters will spend an average of two hours and five minutes in front of a screen. Indeed, according to their parents, 43% of all children under two watch TV every day, and one-quarter (26%) have a TV in their bedroom. Seventy-four percent of all infants and toddlers have watched TV before age two.

Teletubbies and Baby Einstein were particularly disparaged by the report. While millions of “Baby Einstein” videos are sold each year, several panelists pointed out they aren’t in the infant consumers’ best interest: the Einstein videos can be overstimulating and of dubious educational value, several panelists said.

“They’ve been selling a bill of goods to parents,” said Alvin Poussaint, a Harvard professor and expert on adolescent psychiatry, speaking of the new products. Parents buy these products believing they can speed the development of their children’s brains, he says, though there is no empirical proof that they do.