The mum who revolutionised early child-rearing – until she didn’t
In 1996, Baby Einstein co-founder Julia Aigner-Clark was “just a stay-at-home mom”, a former teacher who loved the arts and wanted to expose her daughter to classical music, poetry and art, Aigner-Clark told the New York Times in 2001.
She and her husband William Clark used $18,000 (about R288,000) of their savings to produce a VHS tape that showed toys and visuals mixed in with music, numbers and words in various languages. They named their company I Think I Can Productions and their first video Baby Einstein.
The following year the company received the 1997 Parenting Magazine award for Best Video of the Year. By 1998 they were raking in a reported $1-million a year in revenue. They renamed the company The Baby Einstein Company and produced their first Baby Mozart video, among others. By 2001, the company’s sales turnover was $17.6-million and Walt Disney Company bought the business and went on to produce other hit videos, such as Baby da Vinci, and made hundreds of millions more before selling it to Kids2, its current owners, in 2013.
At its height, the “classical music for infants” craze saw a reported one in three American families buying Baby Einstein videos for their kids. Aigner-Clark became a hit on the talk show circuit, appearing on the likes of the Oprah Winfrey Show. She got the presidential nod when US president George W Bush mentioned her in his 2007 State of the Union address.
But trouble was brewing for the company and for proponents of what became known as “the Mozart effect”.
Rogue science: The study that launched an industry of falsehoods
The idea that classical music could make toddlers smarter was extremely popular when the Clarks founded their company, largely due to the widespread media coverage of a 1993 study that gave birth to the Mozart effect. The study found that participants who listened to a Mozart sonata for 10 minutes significantly improved performance on a spatial intelligence test taken immediately afterwards, by eight to nine IQ points.
Subsequent analysis of the study’s media impact shows it was cited in the top 50 US newspapers 11.4 times more than any other study over a period of eight years after its publication. Such was the Mozart effect phenomenon in the US, the state of
Georgia passed a bill to distribute free classical music CDs to new mothers, and the state of
Florida passed a bill requiring state-funded daycare centres to play classical music daily.
The Clarks have repeatedly said they never claimed listening to Mozart would make babies more intelligent, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable in the climate of widespread coverage to imagine parents associating a video with classical music, from a company called Baby Einstein, with notions of genius.
Walt Disney Company did not shy away from marketing cognitive benefits of Baby Einstein products after buying the company, leading to an advocacy group, then known as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, taking it to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for false advertising in 2006. Walt Disney quickly changed the wording in its product and removed testimonials about educational benefits, narrowly escaping negative findings from the FTC. In 2009, under threat of a class-action lawsuit from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, the company offered cash refunds to unsatisfied parents, reportedly paying out $100-million. By then, not only had various studies debunked the idea of classical music making children more intelligent, but some suggested it was harmful and could slow down development of childrens’ language skills.
Worse, Frances Rauscher, author of the 1993 study that launched the Mozart effect, said she was puzzled by the craze: “There is no compelling evidence that children who listen to classical music are going to have any cognitive improvement… It’s really a myth, in my humble opinion.”
Rauscher had specifically tested for improvement in spatial tasks rather than intelligence in general. The improvement was also short-lived, lasting 15 minutes. Also, it was performed on college students, not on infants.
A 2004 British Journal of Social Psychology study tracked the Mozart effect phenomenon over a decade following Rauscher’s study. It found media coverage increasingly made less mention of the college students and began to associate the Mozart effect with children and babies, sans scientific evidence.
“The most striking finding is increasing association of [the Mozart effect] with infants. There is no scientific research whatsoever linking music and intelligence in infants, and yet, from 1997 onwards, more articles mentioned infants than college students,” the authors wrote.
Their analysis showed 80% of articles mentioned college students in 1994, with no mention of babies, and just over 30% mentioned children in general. By 2002, more than 80% of coverage had associated the Mozart effect with children, 50% with babies, and only 30% with college students.
This is thought to be partially because of the findings of another study by Rauscher, in 1997, which showed “keyboard lessons increase spatial reasoning performance in preschool children”. That is quite different from the Mozart effect and hearing music.
“This fact is confused in some articles,” the authors wrote.
Worse still, a 1999 analysis of other, less popular, 1990s studies concluded that the overall size of the effect in Rauscher’s study was negligible, even among the college students. Numerous other studies concluded that it was the enjoyment of music, whatever the genre, that could hold short-term benefits on focus and priming the brain for tasks among older children and adults.
Beyond being merely harmless, a University of Washington survey of 1,000 families, by Frederick Zimmerman, suggested videos might slow down child development. He said: “For every hour spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than babies who did not watch them.”
Zimmerman added later: “The most important fact ... is there is no clear evidence of benefit from baby DVDs and videos, and there is some suggestion of harm… Parents and caretakers are the baby’s first and best teachers... Watching attention-getting DVDs and TV may not be an even swap for warm social human interaction at this age. Older kids may be different, but the youngest babies seem to learn language best from people.”
Another study, in 2010 on toddlers of 12 to 18 months, found “young children who viewed a popular DVD regularly for one month, either with or without their parents, showed no greater understanding of words than kids who never saw it”.
Music might not turn your toddler into a genius, but Unicef highly recommends exposing infants and even the unborn to music and suggests people enjoy music together – for social connection. Parents are also encouraged to let children learn a musical instrument, which helps develop fine motor skills.