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The Quest For A Superkid  

Geniuses are made, not born — or so parents are told. But can we really train baby brains, and should we try?  

PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME BY THEO WESTENBERGER

Tom Marton and Danit Ben-Ari of Brookline, Mass., have a cunning strategy for successful child rearing. Like most other parents, they wouldn't mind if their two daughters turned out to be among the next Mozarts or Martha Grahams or Mia Hamms. But essentially, they just want to help the girls get the most out of their lives. The key, they've decided, is the weekends, when they see to it that their daughters do ... pretty much nothing at all.

Actually, "nothing at all" isn't quite accurate. If the girls, ages 4 and 7, want to sleep late, they do — as do Mom and Dad. After that, there's time for a family breakfast and a lazy morning and an afternoon of outside play or a museum trip or whatever else strikes the family's fancy. Monday, they all know, will come soon enough, and the girls will be going back to the high-stakes race of schoolwork and homework and ballet or chess or soccer practice. But until then, they are going to have a chance to breathe. "My children," Ben-Ari insists, "will have all the time they need simply to hang out and be children."

There was a time when kids being kids wasn't a radical notion. For generations, childhood may have been life's one, true sweetheart deal: go to school six hours a day, take up hobbies or sports to keep your mind and body active, and the rest of the time you play. If along the way you turned out to have some remarkable talent or unexpected gift, fine. But that wasn't one of the job requirements.

In the past few years, however, all that has changed. At the dawn of the 21st century, a curious — and unsettling — transformation has come over North American kids. The marvelously anarchic institution of childhood has been slowly turning into little more than an apprentice adulthood. Toddlers who once would have been years away from starting their formal education are being hothoused in nursery schools. Preschoolers who would have spent their time learning simply to play and share are being bombarded with flash cards, educational CD-ROMs and other gadgets designed to teach reading, writing and even second languages. Grade-schoolers are spending longer hours at school, still longer ones sweating over homework and filling what time they have left with a buffet line of outside activities that may or may not build character but definitely build résumés. Kids who once had childhoods now have curriculums; kids who ought to move with the lunatic energy of youth now move with the high purpose of the worker bee.

The engine behind this early striving is, often, the parents, who are increasingly consumed by the idea that if they can't perfect their children, they must at least get them as close to that ideal as possible. And who can blame them? Birth rates, while short of baby-boom levels, are nonetheless robust, tightening the competition for spots in the best schools. At the same time, almost all those schools have democratized their admissions policies, meaning it's no longer just the élite who can attend. With competition getting ever keener, kids have to do ever more to distinguish themselves.

Parents are also driven by something a lot more primal: old-fashioned guilt. Even as men take on more responsibility for rearing children, the lion's share of baby care is still handled by mothers. But in an era in which it often takes two incomes to survive, increasing numbers of moms can't spend nearly as much time with their kids as they'd like. In 1999, 62% of mothers worked outside the home. That figure was 54% in 1985 and just 44% in 1975. "Parents feel tremendous guilt because they feel they're spreading themselves too thin," says Dr. Joshua Sparrow of Children's Hospital in Boston. "When parents have time, they can wait for things to happen," adds Rachelle Tyler, an M.D. and professor of pediatrics at UCLA. "But when they're pressured, they feel they've got to see their children respond now."

Into this anxious mix have stepped hucksters and marketers who see worried parents as the most promising pigeons. Store shelves groan with new products purported to stimulate babies' brains in ways harried parents don't have time for. There are baby Mozart tapes said to enhance spatial reasoning and perhaps musical and artistic abilities too. There are black, white and red picture books, said to sharpen visual acuity. There are bilingual products said to train baby brains so they will be more receptive to multiple languages. The hard sell even follows kids to the one place you'd think they'd be allowed some peace — the womb — with handheld tummy speakers designed to pipe music and voices to the unborn baby, the better to stimulate the growing brain and get it ready for the work it will eventually have to do. Parents who don't avail themselves of these products do so at their children's peril: the brain, they are told, has very limited windows for learning certain skills. Let them close, and kids may be set back forever.

But is any of this true? Is it possible to turn an ordinary kid into an exceptional kid? Even if it is, is it worth it to try? Is it better to steer children gently through childhood, letting them make some mistakes and take some scrapes and accept the fact that some of them may not be marked for excellence? Or is it better to strive for a family of superkids, knowing that they are getting the most out of their potential if not out of their youth? Clearly, many parents are caught up in that quest, even if they quietly harbor doubts about its merits. "Parents have, to a large extent, lost confidence in themselves and in their own good judgment," says Peter Gorski, a committee chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The phenomenon of the driven child has been coming for a while, but it was in 1994 that the new breed was truly born. That was the year the Carnegie Corp. published a 134-page report describing a "quiet crisis" among children, who it argued were being ill served by their twin-career parents and their often failing school systems. The report's findings were worrisome enough, but buried in its pages were two disturbing paragraphs warning that schoolkids might not be the only ones suffering; babies could be too. Young brains are extremely sensitive to early influences, the report cautioned, and the right — or wrong — stimuli could have a significant impact on later development.

Those paragraphs went off like a grenade in the otherwise unremarkable study. The press ran alarming stories about blameless children being left behind. The White House called a conference on childhood development. Parents snapped up news of both, hoping it wasn't too late to undo whatever damage they had unwittingly done to their kids. "Every parent began to worry," says John Bruer, president of the McDonnell Foundation and author of the book The Myth of the First Three Years. "They thought, ‘If I don't have the latest Mozart CD, my child is going to jail rather than Yale?'"

In order to make up for their feared lapses, parents indeed started buying the approved kinds of music — and a whole lot more. A study conducted by Zero to Three, a nonprofit research group, found that almost 80% of parents with a high school education or less were assiduously using flash cards, television and computer games to try to keep their babies' minds engaged.

Child-development experts, however, consider these sterile tools inferior to more social and emotional activities such as talking with or reading to children. These specialists agree that the only thing shown to optimize children's intellectual potential is a secure, trusting relationship with their parents. Time spent cuddling, gazing and playing establishes a bond of security, trust and respect on which the entire child-development pyramid is based. "We have given social and emotional development a back seat," says UCLA's Tyler, "and that's doing a great disservice to kids and to our society."

Trying to pump up children's IQs in artificial ways may also lead to increased stress on the kids, as the parents' anxiety starts to rub off. By four or five years old, the brains of stressed kids can start to look an awful lot like the brains of stressed adults, with increased levels of adrenaline and cortisol, the twitchy chemicals that fuel the body's fight-or-flight response. Keep the brain on edge long enough, and the changes become long-lasting, making learning harder as kids get older.

But the fact is, the kids don't have to feel so pressured — and neither do their parents. It is true, as the marketers say, that a baby's brain is a fast-changing thing. Far from passively sponging up information, it is busy from birth laying complex webs of neurons that help it grow more sophisticated each day. It takes anywhere from a year to five years, depending on the part of the brain, for this initial explosion of connections to be made, after which many of them shut down and wither away, as the brain decides which it will keep, which new ones it will need and which it can do without. During this period, it's important that babies get the right kinds of stimulation so their brains can make the right decisions. The right kinds of stimulation, however, may not be the ones people think they are.

Asked in a recent study what skills children need in order to be prepared for school, parents of kindergartners routinely cited definable achievements such as knowing numbers, letters, colors and shapes. Teachers, however, disagree. Far more important, they say, are social skills, such as sharing, interacting with others and following instructions. Kids who come to school with a mastery of these less showy abilities stand a better chance of knocking off not only reading and writing when they are eventually presented but everything else that comes along as well. "Intelligence is based on emotional adequacy," says child-development expert T. Berry Brazelton. "The concept of emotional intelligence is at the base of all this."

It may not even be possible to prod children's intellectual growth. As babies' brains weave their neuronal connections, parents may be able to stimulate, say, the visual or musical ones by exposing kids to picture books or CDs, but it is doubtful that these fortify the brain in any meaningful way. "It's a myth that we can accelerate a child's developmental milestones," says Alan Woolf, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital. "Children are kind of preprogrammed to reach those points." Bruer puts it more bluntly: "The idea that you can provide more synapses by stimulating the child more has no basis in science."

One of the greatest sources of misunderstanding surrounds the so-called Mozart effect. For years researchers have found that playing background music can improve the spatial skills of listeners, causing many laymen to conclude that creative skills can be boosted too. Last year Harvard University released a study called Project Zero that analyzed 50 years of research on this idea. The studies showed that college students who had listened to music performed better on paper-and-pencil spatial tests, but the effect lasted no more than 15 minutes and then faded away. There was no evidence that the listening improved brain power or artistic skills, and certainly none that suggested babies could realize any benefit at all.

Many other misconceptions about brain potential can probably be traced to a series of studies in the 1970s showing that young rats raised with access to mazes and toys had more neural connections than those kept in barren cages. Similarly, studies indicate that children raised without sufficient nurturing often suffer from cognitive deficiencies. However, no evidence indicates that a lot of attention, in the form of early and constant stimulation, enhances a child's intellectual growth. According to the current scientific literature, the type and amount of stimulation needed for proper childhood development is already built into the normal life of an average baby. No whizbang tricks are necessary.

Parents might find it easier to believe all this if it weren't for the increasingly fashionable theory of windows of opportunity for learning — the idea that there are comparatively narrow periods when various parts of the brain can be taught various types of skills. What gives the theory special weight is that there is, in fact, a little truth to it — but only very little. When it comes to language — perhaps the most nuanced skill a person can master — the brain does appear to have fertile and less fertile periods. At birth, babies have the potential to learn any language with equal ease, but by six months, they have begun to focus on the one tongue they hear spoken most frequently. Parents can take advantage of this brain plasticity by introducing a second or even third language, but only if they intend to speak them all with equal frequency until the child is fluent. Merely buying the occasional bilingual toy or videotape will teach kids little, and it certainly will not make it easier for children to learn for real when they get to school.

When it comes to other skills, such as math or music, there is virtually no evidence for learning windows at all. Children grasp things at different rates, and parents whose child can read by age 3 may thus conclude that they somehow threaded the teaching needle perfectly, introducing letters and words at just the right time. But the reality is often that they simply got lucky and had a kid who took a shine early on to a particular skill. "People took the notion of a critical period and misunderstood it to apply to all learning," says Dr. Sparrow of Children's Hospital.

So if parents should be putting down the brain toys, what should they be picking up? For one thing, the kids themselves. If interpersonal skills are the true predictors of how well a child will do in school, parents are the best tutors. Experiments reveal that by the time babies are two months old, they are already fluent in the complex language of their parents' faces, and count on them for their sense of well-being. "Think about the human face," says Sparrow, "the wrinkles, the expressions in the eyes — and think about the infant brain being stimulated by that." To believe that even the best video game or toy could replace this kind of learning, Sparrow thinks, misses the point of just what it is babies are truly hungering to know.

Does this mean educational toys are useless? No. Babies are as engaged by pictures as adults are, and exposing them to books or flash cards early — especially black, white and red ones, which are indeed easier for them to perceive — helps them develop their ability to focus and follow, undeniably a form of learning. Babies are as soothed by music as their parents are, and a little Mozart may indeed hold their attention better than something less rich. Beyond that, however, there's a limit to what the products can do — and parents who follow their children's cues quickly learn that. "When our son was little, all he wanted to do was play with us," says Sharon Chantiles, a casting director and the mother of a four-year-old. "I decided to walk away from the fancy toys and invest in him as a child."

What's at stake for parents is far more than simply a child's school transcript or college options; it's a child's spirit. Recently, author David Brooks spent time on the campus of Princeton University getting to know the students, and he published what he learned in a searching article in the Atlantic magazine. The students were thoroughbred products of the American educational system — gifted, disciplined, driven to succeed, with a calm but consuming focus. And, Brooks found, they were curiously flattened too. There was no evidence of the wildfire energy of the college student, no evidence of much moral passion. More troublingly, there was no sign at all of the sweet and fleeting belief that they could try things and fail at them and try other things and discard them until they found something that truly touched and transformed them — and that they could do for the rest of their lives.

It's a high-stakes game letting kids roll the dice with their futures this way, and the risk — indeed the certainty — exists that at least a few of them will fail. But with their parents standing watchfully by, they need to be allowed to try. The more chances kids take, the greater the odds they will come up winners — and the chips they collect if they do can be priceless.

It is the season again for working parents to brace themselves and shudder as the latest study on child care lands in the headlines to stoke their quiet fears. But not just theirs. A recent survey, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the largest ever on the subject, had something awful for just about everyone.

The more hours children spend away from their mothers, researchers concluded, the more likely they are to be defiant, aggressive and disobedient by the time they get to kindergarten. Kids who are in child care more than 30 hours a week "scored higher on items like 'gets in lots of fights,' 'cruelty,' 'explosive behavior,' as well as 'talking too much,' 'argues a lot' and 'demands a lot of attention,'" said principal researcher Jay Belsky. It didn't matter if the children were black or white, rich or poor, male or female, and — most confounding — whether the care was provided by a traditional child-care center, a nanny, a grandmother, even Dad. Only Mom will do.

But just in case those stay-at-home moms found comfort in the choices and sacrifices they have made, the study also suggests that kids in strong child-care programs tend to develop better language and memory skills, are in certain respects better prepared for school. Would you take that trade, Mom and Dad?

The news refueled some ancient rivalries, revived the most basic questions about what price our children pay for the hours we work and the choices we make. Parents peered into the data looking for themselves, but clear distinctions were hard to find. So far, the unpublished study has offered us only two kinds of children: those raised at home by their mothers (about 1 in 4 children) and everyone else. Which begs the question that the researchers didn't even pretend to answer: Why would kids who are cared for by anyone other than Mom develop disruptive behaviors, and what should we do about it? For that matter, should we even be worried at all? The researchers noted that almost all the "aggressive" toddlers were well within the range of normal behavior for four-year-olds. And what about that adjective, anyway? Is a vice not sometimes a form of virtue? Cruelty never is, but arguing back? Is that being defiant — or spunky and independent? "Demanding attention" could be a natural and healthy skill to develop if you are in a room with 16 other kids.

Some experts in the field argue that the problem is not child care but bad child care. Across the nation there is a numbing range in child-care quality, rules and regulations. Some states allow only six babies in one room, others allow 20. States require all different kinds of licensing and accreditation. Child-care workers get paid about $7 an hour on average, roughly the same as parking-lot attendants; no wonder good care is hard to find. "There is a crisis in this country," says Mary Kakareka, a child-care consultant in Rockville, Md. "Middle-class families pay a lot to get into bad centers — and then down the line, pay again to get their kids in special programs to help solve the problems."

But what constitutes good care, whether in the home or outside it? What is the healthiest way for children to spend their time, especially in the years before school soaks up most of the day? Many anxious parents, wanting the best for their children and willing to pay for it, fill their kids' days with oboe lessons and karate classes, their rooms with phonics tapes and smart toys. And yet if you ask the experts to name the most precious thing you can provide your child, they often cite things you cannot buy: time and attention, the appreciation that play is children's work. Maybe, as the study results suggest, mothers have a special gift for giving that kind of gentle company. But it's hard to believe they are the only ones who can, as anyone with a great baby sitter, grandmother, husband or day-care provider can tell you.

This is the challenge to busy parents, working long hours, strung out at home. What would it take to create an easy, quiet space where you can just hang out with your kids, read a story or make one up, build a fort, make something goopy together? If in the process your children grow secure in the knowledge that you will forgive them for whatever they break or spill or forget, if they learn to share because you are sharing, if they don't have to fight for your attention, those skills may serve them better in the adventure that is kindergarten than being able to distinguish the octagon from the hexagon or fuchsia from lilac. The best news about raising a super child is that the secret to doing it is not to try too hard.

What Ever Happened To Play?  Kids are spending less time frolicking freely, though fun is one of the best things for them

Theresa Collins lives next to a park, but her kids don't play there all that often. For one thing, all three of her children lead busy lives, what with school, piano lessons, soccer practice and the constant distraction of the home computer. What's more, she fears that the park is dangerous. "I've heard of people exposing themselves there," says Theresa, a 42-year-old special-education teacher in Sarasota, Fla. And while she's not sure if the scary stories are true, she would rather be safe than sorry, like so many other contemporary parents. Her daughter Erica, 9, isn't allowed to visit the park without her brother Christopher, 11, who wasn't permitted to play alone there until about a month ago. As for Matthew, 16, who might have supervised Christopher, he avoids the park by choice. He favors video games. "It's a shame," says Theresa. So why doesn't she take the kids to the park? "It's boring. And I don't have time," she says. "When I'm home, I have a lot to do here."

No wonder swing sets are feeling lonely. With so many roving flashers to elude, so many high-tech skills to master, so many crucial tests to pass and so many anxious parents to reassure, children seem to be playing less and less these days. Even hassled grownups are starting to notice. "We're taking away childhood," says Dorothy Sluss, a professor of early-childhood education at East Tennessee State University. "We don't value play in our society. It has become a four-letter word."

Statistics back her up. In 1981, according to University of Michigan researchers, the average school-age child had 40% of the day for free time — meaning hours left over after sleeping, eating, studying and engaging in organized activities. By 1997, the figure was down to 25%.

The very existence of research studies on play suggests that ours is a serious society that can take the fun out of almost anything, including the issue of fun itself. That's why any list of the enemies of play must begin with adults, who make the rules. If play is endangered, it's parents who have endangered it, particularly those who feel that less goofing off in the name of youthful achievement is a good thing. See Dick run. Well, that's fine for little Dick, but wouldn't most parents rather raise a Jane who sits still, studies and gets into Harvard?

If so, they're shortsighted, say the experts on play. Alvin Rosenfeld, co-author of The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap, holds an old-fashioned view of play: it's joyful and emotionally nourishing. Stuart Brown, a retired psychiatrist and founder of the Institute for Play in Carmel Valley, Calif., believes that too little play may have a dark side. What Brown calls "play deprivation" can lead, he says, to depression, hostility and the loss of "the things that make us human beings."

Play doesn't just make kids happy, healthy and human. It may also make them smarter, says Rosenfeld. Today's mania for raising young Einsteins, he observes, might have destroyed the real Einstein — a notorious dreamer who earned poor grades in school but somewhere in his frolics divined the formula for the relationship between matter and energy. Play refreshes and stimulates the mind, it seems. And "frequent breaks may actually make kids more interested in learning," according to Rhonda Clements, a Hofstra University professor of physical education.

The case for play is simple and intuitive, which is what makes the decline of play a mystery. If Dick can run wild and get into Princeton too, then why isn't he out there running his little head off? That play has real value won't surprise most parents. That their kid horses around less than they did when they were young probably doesn't shock them either. The puzzle is, Where did all the playtime go?

Millie Wilcox, 60, thinks she knows. The retired nurse and mother of two grown boys doesn't have a Ph.D. in child psychology, just a memory of her own Ohio childhood picking elderberries in the alley and once — imagine doing this today — playing house inside a cardboard box set smack dab in the middle of the street. "There wasn't so much traffic back then," says Wilcox, "and it seems like every neighborhood had a vacant lot. Vacant lots were important. Plus, our mothers were around during the day, and they knew everyone on the block, so they weren't scared for us."

There's common sense behind Wilcox's nostalgia for her old stamping grounds. After all, play needs to happen somewhere — preferably somewhere safe and open and not entirely dominated by grownups — but those idyllic somewheres are growing scarce. "In the huge rush to build shopping malls and banks," says Clements, "no one is thinking about where kids can play. That doesn't generate tax revenue."

What about those inviting vacant lots? "There's practically no such thing anymore," laments urban planner Robin Moore, a former president of the International Association for the Child's Right to Play. Thanks to sidewalk-free subdivisions, congested roads and ubiquitous commercial developments, "all the free space has been spoken for," says Moore. Roger Hart, an environmental psychologist at the City University of New York, cites a general "disinvestment in public space" as one reason children are playing less outdoors. Even public sandboxes are vanishing. Says Hart: "People have become paranoid about animal waste." What's more, as the average family size gets smaller and suburban houses are built farther apart, "kids have a harder time finding each other than they used to," Moore says.

Parental fear is also a factor. Fear of molesters, bacteria, zooming suvs. Neighbors who own guns. Neighbors who let their kids eat refined sugar. The list is as lengthy as last Sunday's newspaper, and it grows longer with every new edition. "It used to be," Hart says, "that in the presence of one another, kids formed a critical mass to keep each other safe. Gone are the days when children make any of their own plans." Their fearful, ambitious parents made plans for them, but these plans don't always mesh, unfortunately. A suburban Chicago mom who wishes to remain anonymous called up a school friend of her daughter's to arrange a play date. The kindergartner was booked solid. "It seems like kids today are always on the way to somewhere," complains the disillusioned mom.

Beholder

An elderly woman and her little grandson, whose face was sprinkled with bright freckles, spent the day at the zoo.

Lots of children were waiting in line to get their cheeks painted by a local artist who was decorating them with tiger paws.

"You've got so many freckles, there's no place to paint!" a girl in the line said to the little fella. Embarrassed, the little boy dropped his head.

His grandmother knelt down next to him. "I love your freckles. When I was a little girl I always wanted freckles," she said, while tracing her finger across the child's cheek. "Freckles are beautiful!"

The boy looked up, "Really?"

"Of course," said the grandmother. "Why just name me one thing that's more beautiful than freckles."

The little boy thought for a moment, peered intensely into his grandma's face, and softly whispered, "Wrinkles."

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