Fast-Track Toddlers

By Michael Lemonick

Considering that there's essentially no science to support it, the Mozart effect has had a pretty good run. Parents all over the U.S. have been playing the Austrian composer's music to their infants and toddlers on the theory that it stimulates brain development. Even a few state governments have got into the act: Georgia and Tennessee are giving classical-music CDs to new mothers, and Florida has mandated that state-run day-care facilities play such music each day.

In fact, though, the original research behind this attractive notion said nothing about infants or even about intelligence, and it certainly made no claims about brain development. All it showed was that a group of college students did better on a battery of specialized tests shortly after listening to Mozart--and to make matters worse, no scientist has been able to duplicate those results, despite numerous attempts.

As a book to be published next month makes clear, neurologists know very little about how the brain develops in the first few years of life. In The Myth of the First Three Years, John Bruer, president of the McDonnell Foundation, based in St. Louis, Mo., argues that much of the advice parents are getting about how to make their very young kids smarter and more talented is based on gross exaggerations of brain science. So, he says, is the notion, suggested by some advocacy groups, that brain development all but shuts down after age three. Too much focus on this so-called critical period, he claims, in the form of programs like Head Start, may thus be misguided.

Surprisingly, most of his targets agree with Bruer--to a point. "It's quite true," says Dr. Charles Nelson, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota, "that there aren't any studies looking at brain development in young children." And Matthew Melmed, executive director of Zero to Three, an educational organization whose advice-laden website is a target of Bruer's ire, acknowledges that "there have been some who have stretched the science."

But the experts point out that Bruer too has stretched his arguments far beyond what makes sense. "We may not have neuroscience research to back up a lot of what we believe about child development," says Dr. Patricia Kuhl, an expert on speech and hearing at the University of Washington. "But we do have a wealth of data over the past 40 years from developmental and cognitive psychology that tell us those early years are hugely important."

In most cases, the data address what happens when children are deprived of stimulation, not what happens when they get extra helpings. If kids aren't routinely exposed to language during the first year of life, for example--sign language, if they're deaf--they gradually lose the capacity to learn it at all. Similarly, kids who have uncorrected eye disorders early on will lose the capacity to coordinate the vision in both eyes. "We can't prove conclusively that these deficits involve the wiring of the brain," admits Kuhl. "But we're pretty sure it isn't happening in the big toe."

When it comes to emotional development, moreover, it's been demonstrated again and again that children whose parents rarely talk to them or pick them up or show them affection tend to be emotionally damaged for life. Do scientists understand the physical basis for such effects? No. Does that mean they aren't real? No.

But just because sensory and emotional deprivation leads to damage, argues Bruer, that doesn't mean extra stimulation will make a child better than normal. And on that too just about everyone agrees. "The assumption that if a normally stimulating environment is good, a 'superenvironment' must be better," says Nelson, "has no basis in science." In fact, argues Melmed, it can be worse: "If you try to give your baby more stimulation than she can handle, she'll shut down."

The real problem with parents' playing Mozart or making the baby listen to foreign-language tapes or forcing him to look at works of great art is that this satisfies the parents' agenda, not necessarily the child's. "Babies are like little scientists," says Kuhl, who, along with two co-authors, presents her ideas in a book also coming out next month, The Scientist in the Crib. "They take in data, make hypotheses about the outside world and test them." This sort of learning goes on throughout life, but Kuhl argues convincingly that the process is most intense and wide ranging in the first few years.

Trying to push a child in a specific direction or to exercise specific mental muscles, in short, is probably relatively harmless, but it's also almost certainly a waste of time. Giving the toddler plenty of opportunity to explore the world and interact with people in a positive way, on the other hand, is essential to successful early parenting.

The problem most experts have with Bruer is that by taking a reasonable point and pushing it too far, he does just what he accuses others of doing. A quick visit to one of his favorite targets, the "I Am Your Child" website, makes that clear. The basic guidelines for zero- to three-year-olds outlined on the site's introductory page read as follows: "Be warm, loving and responsive. Respond to the child's cues and clues. Talk, read and sing to your child. Establish routines and rituals. Encourage safe exploration and play. Make TV watching selective. Use discipline as an opportunity to teach. Recognize that each child is unique. Choose quality child care and stay involved. Take care of yourself."

Maybe those suggestions aren't based on rigorous neuroscientific research, and maybe they're equally applicable to kids of four or five. But they're pretty good advice nonetheless.

For more about parenting young children, see our website at time.com/personal Send e-mail to Mike at timfamily2@aol.com