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The Active Viewing Revolution Is Here
The family television set, a twenty-seven-inch Toshiba, suddenly seemed to loom over the living room with the omniscient aura of the monolith in 2001. For reasons I am still trying to understand, I cocked my head that winter morning, ape-like, and beheld it as a mysterious gift from the technology gods. This was no longer a mere hunk of metal and glass on which I squandered my own waking hours, watching three consecutive SportsCenters or handicapping which sequined pair would win Dancing with the Stars. No, this cube was now a Socratic learning tool, even a shamanistic guide to life. And I, as father and provider, would bestow it upon my daughter, who would bask in its radiant, edifying glow for all her days. Margot was six months old at the time. And it's worth noting that my epiphany occurred at 6:17 a.m.
The morning shift had become my routine once Margot had blessedly learned to sleep through the night. I rose with her as a small trade-off for the fact that my wife, Stella, usually put her down to sleep and awakened for multiple nighttime feedings. Coping with the skull-scrambling feeling of new-parent jet lag, I would retrieve the newspaper, hold Margot close to my bathrobe-clad body, and shuffle downstairs. Lurching Tony Soprano-style into the kitchen, I'd balance her over one shoulder while I ground coffee beans, measured out water, started a pot brewing, and warmed up her breakfast. On that fateful morning, we plopped down in the living room on a floor mat known by its marketers as the Tiny Love Gymini® 3D Activity Gym. Tiny Love claims that its red, white, and black geometric design approximates the womb and stimulates babies' brains. I can't speak for Margot, but the mat apparently made a synapse fire in my head, and I remembered a TV program I had not seen for almost thirty years. I sparked up the Toshiba and tuned to Sesame Street.
An hour passed blissfully. We sat together but faced the screen. I read the paper and slurped my coffee, glancing up occasionally to see reassuringly familiar sights straight out of my own childhood: the classic New York stoops, Big Bird talking to Maria, Oscar in his trash can. Margot cooed and pointed a couple of times, especially during a computer-animated segment that was new to me, "Elmo's World." I couldn't tell exactly what she made of Sesame Street, but I took great comfort in that hour. It was me-time that doubled as an introduction for her to some of my old friends, who, I believed, would teach her only the purest principles, the most intellect-enhancing concepts -- Tiny Love on the floor, tiny love on the screen.
Of course things did not remain so simple. Day after day of this morning ritual (often repeated in the evenings as we made dinner) soon got Margot hooked. She would gaze, gape-mouthed, for up to two hours at a shot. Attempting to turn the TV off became an ordeal that produced tears and screams. Over the next few months, as she grew, the menu of offerings seemed to expand accordingly. A modest serving of Sesame Street exploded into a twenty-four-hour Las Vegas buffet of diversions. Between DVD and cable TV, dozens of playmates beckoned and Margot fell in with a rotating series of them, most with short, catchy names -- Maisy, Miffy, Oobi, Franklin, JoJo, Caillou, Dora. When her obsession became the low-rent DVD series called Baby Prodigy, starring a duck named Dookie ("Raise a healthier, smarter baby!" the box blares), it seemed there was no end to the offerings. I felt like I was trapped in the final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a long zoom-out that reveals not just the single, known ark in a crate but a vast, Orwellian warehouse of goods.
The journalist part of me stirred. I wanted to find out more about the supply side of the preschool entertainment equation, rather than just participating in it as a parent eager for a glimpse at the morning paper and a vestige of my preparenthood routine. Looking closer, I was astounded by how massive the warehouse was and how meticulously and secretly its contents were calibrated to stoke the appetites of consumers barely able to sit up.
As I started exploring the boom, quotidian objects and names I took for granted suddenly acquired startling new dimensions. Take Tiny Love, an Israeli company that has rapidly expanded well beyond its traditional business of mats and rattles. It is now pushing a video series called MagIQ designed for kids from six to thirty-six months. A company spokesman hastened to insist that Tiny Love "wasn't much into sitting a baby down in front of a DVD and letting them just be a couch potato." Therefore, in order to engender more interactivity, the company packaged the DVDs, which show simple animations of boats, ducks, and the like, with a little stuffed teddy bear. The bear comes with a chip inside and a series of vocal responses to what's playing on the screen. According to the company and the "experts" it marshaled, the presence of the bear creates more interaction with the child and the screen.
The promotional video for MagIQ speaks volumes. "A ball," the narrator begins as everyday objects appear on-screen. "Your baby can kick it, pass it, chase it. A butterfly. Your baby can play with it, sing to it, make friends with it. A xylophone. Listen to it. Dance to it. Make awful noise to it. An apple. Eat it. Wash it. Roll it. Color. Paint it. Express himself with it. But when all this appears on a TV screen, your baby can only...watch it." Cut to a shot of a two-year-old in a beanbag chair looking at a TV with raccoon eyes and a frown. "That's why Tiny Love has decided to create MagIQ." A choir sings: "Maaaa-giiic!" The narrator continues, "A totally active new viewing experience that makes your baby switch from passive to active. The magic lies within the triangle formed by your baby, the TV, and our truly special doll. Our doll encourages your baby to participate, sing, laugh, and react to the DVD content on the screen."
A voice on the screen-within-the-screen says, "I see -- the boat is upside down!" and the camera shows a baby looking between her legs, upside down, and laughing. A montage follows showing babies smiling and laughing as the elemental animations play on the room's TV screen. The background is completely white. White furniture, white walls. Are we in heaven?
"So next time you buy a DVD for your baby, don't just watch the screen. Watch your baby. And if she looks like this [a smash-cut montage shows laughing one-year-olds playing with the doll] then it must be MagIQ. The active viewing revolution is here."
Actively or passively, preschoolers devour $21 billion worth of TV programs, DVDs, CDs, stage shows, magazines, and tie-in toys every year -- a figure that has nearly tripled since 2001. In that watershed year, the Walt Disney Company bought the Baby Einstein line of DVDs and toys and Dora the Explorer went on the air. Dora now generates $1.5 billion in annual revenue and draws nine million viewers each morning, more than Today or Good Morning America. A recent survey by nonprofit group Zero to Three found that the mean age when babies start watching videos is 6.1 months and they watch television at 9.8 months. Baby Einstein, acquired for $25 million, has mushroomed into a billion-dollar asset that cranks out a spectrum of "infant development" products from videos to bassinets to party kits. Dozens of companies emulating those top brands have collectively altered child-rearing by marketing to viewers from an age they chillingly call "zero," though the real targets are their doting, gear-obsessed parents, the first TV-raised generation to become parents themselves. These new parents have scooped up millions of CDs by artists such as Dan Zanes, the former lead singer of '80s college-rock band the Del Fuegos who has reinvented himself as the floppy-haired Pied Piper of preschool kids. They have laughed along with spoofs of their Muppet-TV youth such as Broadway's Avenue Q or MTV2's lacerating Wonder Showzen, whose creators' stated aim is to "take all the things you loved about watching TV as a kid and turn them into a twisted nightmare for all ages."
The airwaves teem with preschool TV networks, among them Noggin, PBS Kids Sprout, BabyFirstTV (aimed, incredibly, at children ages six to thirty-six months), BabyTV, and large blocks of programming on Cartoon Network, the Disney Channel, Discovery Channel, and The Learning Channel. A generation ago, there were two shows for preschoolers: Sesame Street and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Today, more than fifty shows vie for the two- to five-year-old audience every day of the week. Thriving DVD lines such as Baby Einstein, Baby Genius, and Brainy Baby are among many targeting the very youngest viewers with a cognitive development bent. Sesame Workshop has drawn protests from some child development advocates with its new infant DVDs called Sesame Beginnings, which use diaper-clad baby versions of Elmo, Big Bird, and Cookie Monster to reach under-twos and their parents. By 2007, one in three DVDs bought in the United States (51 million units) was intended for the pacifier crowd.
Nielsen, the TV ratings company, has no reliable method of tracking viewers under two years old, and scientific research is scarce and inconclusive as to the effects of media exposure on them. "They're very squirrelly and you have to infer what they're thinking," explained Georgene Troseth, a preschool media expert at Vanderbilt University. Yet this audience is clearly fueling the boom. A 2006 study found that 59 percent of kids under two watch TV daily; 42 percent begin watching before they turn one; 36 percent have TV sets in their own room; and 52 percent know how to operate the remote control. U.S. population trends are likely to accelerate the flow of product into the marketplace -- the U.S. Census Bureau projects the annual birth rate to grow by 20 percent over the next generation, from 4 million now to 4.8 milli...
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