by Mary Aiken
Harlow did an experiment allowing the orphaned baby monkeys to choose between two surrogate mothers. One was a wire-framed “mother” that had a milk bottle to feed the baby. The other “mother” was made of soft terry cloth—but had no milk bottle. All the monkey babies preferred their soft terry-cloth mother with no milk, and spent their days cuddling and hugging them, visiting the “bottle mother” only for feeding.
The babies chose tactile love over food in every instance. In a second experiment, Harlow scared the monkeys with a frightening sound or other stimulus in their cages—a banging noise and a robot-type contraption with flashing eyes and moving arms. Panicked and under stress, the babies ran quickly to their soft moms for comfort, clinging to the terry cloth and calming down.
Some baby monkeys were not given soft terry-cloth mothers; instead they were given the wire-frame milk-dispensing machines, and these babies showed much less emotional resilience. When they were frightened by loud, unexpected sounds, they were unable to cope or be comforted. They threw themselves on the ground, clutched themselves, or rocked back and forth, shrieking. This proved that infant love and bonding is not simply a matter of feeding but an important and crucial psychological resource that made the monkeys emotionally stronger.
Like the monkeys, a human being’s attachment-style pattern is formed early, but not set in stone. Our emotional template and other templates are continually being updated throughout our lives. The human brain is often described as “plastic,” which means that it is able to change—physically, functionally, and chemically. And for a human baby, a terry-cloth mother who provides only tactile comfort is not enough. Many experiments in the past century have shown the catastrophic effects of sensory and social deprivation during certain critical periods in early childhood, and the subsequent effects on later development. And healthy attachment or “connectivity” patterns have been proven to be important to a child’s intellectual growth and progress.
How does bonding work?
A mother and her child need to be paying attention to each other. They need to engage and connect. It cannot be simply one-way. It isn’t just about your baby bonding with you. Eye contact is also about you bonding with your baby. In terms of evolutionary theory, infants are soft and cuddly, cute and round, and completely adorable because their appearance lures adults to look at them—attention that they critically need. This is true of baby animals in almost any species. Think of bear cubs, puppies, kittens. (Their popularity on social media networks alone should prove this!) They are soft, round, and supercute, which to date has given them an edge in the competition for attention. If babies weren’t so cute, they might not learn to talk, walk—or do hundreds of other things that interaction with their human caregivers teaches them.
When these bonds and connectivity patterns are not formed properly—something that’s usually seen in neglectful or abusive homes, or in environments like large orphanages and other institutions where children receive infrequent interaction and don’t have the opportunity for tactile stimulation and exploration—a child may even fail to develop the neural pathways necessary for learning. When the deprivation is extreme enough, a child may fail to thrive, may never learn to bond with others. Or learn to love.
We know this because of the examples of children who were raised in isolation or in the wild. There are at least nine famous cases of feral children over the past century. And while these stories are sad, the information about child development gleaned by scientists has been invaluable. In each case, the children were accidentally separated from their families, or ran away, causing them to grow up without human contact during their formative years. In several cases, children were raised with packs of wild dogs or wolves, like Mowgli in The Jungle Book. How this impacted the child depended on the age when all human contact was removed. But in several cases, children who were raised with dogs or wolves walked on all fours—and barked. A Russian boy who was raised in a room with dozens of birds (his negligent mother treated him like a pet) was rescued at the age of seven by social workers. He couldn’t speak, and when he was agitated he chirped and flapped his arms.
There are almost no incidents of a wild child developing into a fully functioning adult (or at least a conventional version of one), because there are windows in the formative years when very specific skills need to be learned. When those developmental windows close, a child may be developmentally or emotionally crippled for life.
For parents raising their child in a normal household, the simple idea that a baby needs a mother’s eye contact—a small but significant aspect to child rearing—probably didn’t need to be emphasized until recently. Until sixty years ago, apart from listening to music or the radio, what else was there to do while you fed your baby?
But in the media-saturated environment of the average household, this has changed. And given the size, portability, and interactivity of phones and tablets, an Internet connection and a wireless device now vie with an infant’s need for one-on-one interaction on trains, park benches, and even sitting at home on the couch. When fifty-five caregivers with children were observed in fast-food restaurants by researchers for a 2014 study in Pediatrics journal, a vast majority of them (forty caregivers) used mobile devices during the meal and some (sixteen caregivers) used their devices continuously, their attention “directed primarily at the device” and not the children. These devices are so compelling that they can overwhelm basic human instincts. Together with the fact that the workday for most adults has become round-the-clock—another change facilitated by technology—parents come home to their young families still distracted by work questions and interruptions. At the office, cyber-slacking is what happens when you check your Facebook wall when you should be knee-deep in a financial-forecast Excel spreadsheet. But the reverse can be true at home. Instead of spending time with their children, many parents find themselves still distracted by their devices. (Remember that statistic from chapter 2 that mobile phone checking actually increases after work hours?) I assume that in many households, older siblings of these babies are likewise distracted, often entertained by screen games and fun apps rather than occupying themselves with the new baby (as all bored older siblings once did).
Who is the real loser in this new scenario?
The baby.
It scares me to think that this could be the first time you are reading about the importance of face time with your baby (and I don’t mean the app kind of FaceTime). Perhaps it has been drowned out by louder debates. Society has passionately discussed the nutritional values of breast-feeding and the best age and method for potty training. Governments regulate the designs of car seats and mandate the use of them while banning lead paint and flammable sleepwear and bedding. It’s hard to pick up a marble or a Lego piece without seeing a printed warning label about choking hazards for children under two.
Of course the primary thing is to keep your baby safe. And obviously, you’ll find no argument from me about that. Regulations against the marketing of unsafe toys save thousands of lives each year and result in many fewer children with brain damage due to asphyxiation or poisoning by toxic chemicals. But it might be time to reconsider other less immediate and less obvious dangers.
Am I saying that unless you stare constantly at your baby it will become feral? Obviously not. But I am saying that if the average baby born in 2016 receives significantly less one-on-one interaction, less eye contact, than the average baby born in 1990, there will be an effect or change.
Like what kind of effect?
Let me take a few guesses, the kind that academics like me aren’t really encouraged to make—speculation is not considered “good science,” but in some cases it is very necessary. Over time, people could become less able to interact face-to-face, less sociable. People could become less likely to form deep bonds with others, less able to feel or give love, and therefore less likely to form lasting relationships, families, and communities. Some could find physical contact with other human beings problemati
c and even unwelcome. There could be a domino effect. Subsequent generations could be raised with even less attention, less love—or none at all. While it’s true that humans are gregarious by nature, and a search for connection is a basic human instinct and a survival skill, it does not happen magically and on its own. Real-world face time is required. This small and simple thing, millions of babies around the world getting less eye contact and less one-on-one attention, could result in an evolutionary blip.
Yes, I said it. Evolutionary blip.
Less eye contact could change the course of human civilization.
But so far, there aren’t campaigns to alert parents to the dangers of their wandering attention span. Nobody seems to be even talking about this issue, this real risk, except those with an interest in cyberpsychology. If the lobbying group for babies (who don’t really contribute to the economy, do they?) were as strong and rich and persistent as the ones for Big Pharma, real-estate agents, retirees, the technology industry, and commercial banks, someday there might be writing on the screen of all mobile phones that says:
Warning: Not Looking at Your Baby Could Cause Significant Developmental Delays.
Infants: Show Me the Science
The baby on the train to Galway was small, less than a few months old, a time in a baby’s life that is referred to by some developmental scientists as the “fourth trimester.” At three months, a baby is still quite fetal. During this remarkable period, his or her brain will grow about 20 percent in three months.
Experiences in the world are what keeps a baby’s brain growing—and what keeps a baby developing properly. When a baby is born, each cell of the brain has around 2,500 synapses—the connections that allow the brain to pass along signals. In the next three years, that number grows to about 15,000 per brain cell, when the brain creates 700 to 1,000 new neural connections every second. Synapse formation for key developmental functions such as hearing, language, and cognition peak during this time, making this window in a young child’s life extremely crucial for the development of higher-level functions.
This was the thinking behind the Baby Einstein products, which were first marketed in 1997 by a former teacher and stay-at-home mom, Julie Aigner-Clark. She and her husband, William Clark, invested $18,000 of their own savings to produce the first product, a video they called Baby Einstein, meant for infants and children under two. It showed toys and cartoons and other visuals interspersed with sounds and music, stories, numbers, and words in several languages. Just four years later, the Baby Einstein franchise was bringing in $25 million a year, and several companies had invested to become part owners, including Disney.
The premise?
Stimulate your baby’s brain and you can increase a baby’s intelligence, or even create a baby genius.
Except…what about the science?
Too much stimulation is not necessarily a good thing.
Visual acuity, as it’s known in the field of child development, is acquired in the first two years of life, if a baby is raised in normal real-world conditions. This window of time is crucial in the creation of properly functioning eyesight. Similar to the way language skills should be acquired before five years of age, the same goes with depth perception and binocular vision, which is a factor in hand-eye coordination, balance, and fine motor skills. At birth an infant’s visual acuity ranges from 20/200 to 20/400 (the higher the number, the worse the eyesight) and improves rapidly in the first years of life, further evidence of the incredible changes that happen in the infant brain during this period. By the time infants reach two years of age, most of them have miraculously achieved 20/20 vision.
Perceptual development is a true neurobiological wonder—and a product of nature and nurture. It doesn’t happen without an environment. As soon as they are born, babies begin scanning the world around them and looking for meaningful patterns.
During the first two months of life, their eyes focus on edge detection and shapes, a process that has inspired work in the science of computer vision (or image understanding). At three months, a baby’s focus shifts to internal features of an object, or the features within a shape. There’s a part of the brain in both children and adults that is dedicated to face processing, or facial recognition, something that we know from brain imaging studies. Babies demonstrate an ability to prefer their mother’s face from the earliest hours of life, and by two to three months old they show a preference for the internal features of her face, particularly her eyes.
This means, as much as adults are hardwired to find babies irresistible to look at—for the survival of the species—a baby will prefer to look at its mother’s face and eyes over other things. This is how development and learning begin.
Can an animated app, an avatar, or a 3-D cartoon video replace this, re-create it, or override human nature?
In 2006, nearly a decade after the initial launch of its products, a complaint was filed against the Baby Einstein company, which had become a booming multi-million-dollar-a-year global brand, for making false claims. Eventually several studies backed up this complaint, alleging that young children who viewed the videos regularly for one month, with or without parents, showed no greater understanding of words from the program than children who had never seen it.
Even more troubling, a research team of developmental experts coordinated by the University of Washington studied infants between eight and sixteen months who were exposed to videos and DVDs such as those sold by Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby and found this exposure to be strongly associated with lower scores on a standard language development test. In other words, the study claimed that these videos could delay speech. The interpretation of the study findings were softened later, when the founders of Baby Einstein sued the University of Washington and a second team of experts was brought in to interpret the findings—and determined that the videos had minimal to no impact on infant development. Negative impact was declared “not sufficiently proven.” Disney, which by then owned the Baby Einstein brand, changed the wording of the product claims on its merchandise and offered a refund to anyone who had purchased the DVDs for language enhancement purposes and hadn’t seen results.
Let’s take the Baby Einstein debate out of the courts for a second. And let’s put aside whether the University of Washington study was interpreted correctly the first time. This is the salient question: What is really known about brain development and the acquisition of language (and other cognitive skills) in infants?
The evidence is irrefutable: The best way to help a baby learn to talk or develop any other cognitive skill is through live interaction with another human being. Time and time again videos and television shows have been shown to be ineffective in learning prior to the age of two. Most significant, a study of one thousand infants found that babies who watched more than two hours of DVDs per day performed worse on language assessments than babies who did not watch DVDs. For each hour of watching a DVD, babies knew six to eight words fewer than babies who did not watch DVDs. Still, some formats, some shows, and some ways of delivering educational information to young children have been shown to be more effective. These seem to be quieter shows, calmer formats with only one story line—the television show Blue’s Clues, for instance, and Teletubbies.
Children who are taught by their parents and caregivers, people with whom they have an emotional bond, demonstrate the most improvement. Researchers speculate that this is probably because very young children learn through gestures and interactive communication with adults. In other words, babies learn best from humans, not machines.
So why do these “early learning” products continue to sell well? There is a never-ending parade of them, as any trip to iTunes, Amazon, or a baby store will show you. A recent and mind-boggling example of this was a 2013 Fisher-Price product called the Apptivity Seat, designed to “grow” with your child. For a newborn, it was a bouncy seat. For a toddler, it became a walker. In both cases, it was a sedentary entertainment contraption with an “overhead pivoting c
ase” that held an iPad or tablet over the baby or toddler’s face. Just $74.59 on Amazon, it came with free-to-download apps that were advertised as “developmental,” “soothing,” and “early learning.”
In the sales photograph shown on Amazon, an infant is pictured with an iPad only a baby’s-arm-length from its face. (This is probably because the optimal viewing distance for a newborn is six to twelve inches.) This way, even before the baby has the motor skills to lift the device or the neck strength to turn away, the poor thing is trapped by technology. It’s less of an Apptivity Seat and more of a captivity seat.
One special feature was advertised: “Locks your iPad device securely inside case to protect from dribbles and drool.” That’s very thoughtful. The iPad stays clean, but in the meantime, who is bothering to protect Baby?
Quickly dubbed the “worst toy of the year” by consumer groups, the Apptivity Seat was soon discontinued by its manufacturer. The apps, however, are still available online—and can be used with the Apptivity Gym, which positions a device above your baby’s head while he or she lies on a mat.
Here’s what troubles me. Let’s start with the fact that a mobile phone or any wireless device is considered by many public health experts to be a risk and possible carcinogen for newborns, due to the unknown effects of radiation exposure on their fragile, developing systems. We also don’t know how looking at the screen of a tablet might impact an infant’s eyesight development. A very interesting series of studies from 1958 (that led to a Nobel Prize) was carried out on kittens, revealing that visual experiences at birth, when the brain has a high degree of plasticity, have permanent and irreversible effects. These studies are really important in terms of the impact of visual stimuli such as exposure to digital screens, as they demonstrate that sensory input is central to visual development in newborns.