Is This Crib Necessary?

"A total responsive environment," the manufacturer calls it. That is the way one company describes its new three-level baby crib equipped with toys to grasp and pull, sand timers to watch, wheels to spin, voice-activated mobiles and sound tapes, plus a tank awash with live fish. According to the developers and to some child psychologists who have endorsed the environmental crib, almost every baby needs such a scientifically engineered corral for sleep and play. Parents who prefer the traditional, simple "containment crib," it has been argued, may end up with a child who is not too bright.

The claims for the gadget-laden crib typify a growing trend in child psychology toward forced early education and "programmed enrichment." Now Harvard Pediatrician Richard Feinbloom has strongly urged the American Academy of Pediatrics to take a stand against it. At the organization's recent annual meeting, he maintained that elaborate educational toys for infants are no be' er playthings than pots and pans. As a matter of fact, he said, their use, especially in the elaborate new "crib environments," may endanger normal intellectual and emotional development.

A follower of famed Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget, Feinbloom believes that systematic infant training generally fails to speed learning--with or without special toys. Even when children do acquire some skills early--counting, for example, or understanding the principle of cause and effect--they soon forget them, and rarely can they apply this knowledge to new situations. In any case, knowledge gained unusually early has no value over the long run. Kittens, for example, understand "object permanence"--the idea that things stay the same even when they are out of sight --before human infants do, but "they cannot do very much with their precocious acquisition," Feinbloom observes.

Children and Chicks. Beyond that, Feinbloom believes that teaching babies is no substitute for playing with them; turning them over "to a machine wired up for sound and light" deprives them of the warm parent-child give-and-take that is crucial to emotional health and to eventual academic achievement.

In essence, the rationale for the new special equipment is that certain mental skills can be acquired only by "imprinting," a special form of rapid learning that generally occurs at certain critical periods soon after birth if it is to occur at all. That is the way newly hatched chicks learn to follow their mothers. But, observes Feinbloom, children are not chickens: they do not learn intellectual skills by imprinting, and if they miss one learning opportunity, they will get another later on. "Do we need any more anxiety than we already have about reaching milestones on time?" he asks rhetorically. Also erroneous, Feinbloom insists, is the theory that everything that is learned must be taught. In fact, children pick up abstract concepts just by exploring the world around them and meeting new situations.

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