Optimising child development

Don't sweat it

"Is everyone doing enrichment activities with their infants? Because I’m definitely not and am now a wee bit concerned I should be.

He’s two months old.”

I found this heartfelt question on Reddit, and it breaks my heart. Parenting is hard enough without being unnecessarily worried that you are failing your child. And in this case, the worry really is unnecessary.

The thing is, I remember being in the same boat. My eldest was maybe a year old and it was a struggle to organise play dates with the other babies from my new mothers group. Most of the mums had gone back to at least part-time work by that stage, and on their days off they were busy taking their babies to baby swimming lessons, baby music lessons, baby sensory classes. These babies practically needed a personal assistant to handle their calendars.

I couldn’t afford to do any of that. And while I didn’t worry too much about it, I did wonder at times if my son was missing out. Was there really value in starting these classes so young?

Well, wonder no more. We’re going to track the rise of baby and toddler enrichment activities, uncovering the cultural shifts in parenting that first allowed the idea of optimising child development to took root, the sketchy interpretations of science that fertilized its growth, and the commercialisation by the capitalist machine that have let this idea spread like an invasive weed—choking out trust in natural child development.

Photo by luis arias on Unsplash

Historical Context

At the start of the 20^th century, it was hard to raise kids. Many died in infancy. Only half of them made it to their 15^th birthday. Yet this difficulty in raising children made parenting comparatively easy. The primary goal of parenting was trying to keep your kids alive and healthy.

As our medical understanding developed, more information was available about the ‘right’ way to raise children. There was an increased focus on how to safely prepare infant formulas, how long a baby should be allowed to cry daily to strengthen the lungs, and how to bathe infants. While the focus was on looking after the physical needs of the infant, the information was less about enhancing physical development and more about preventing disease and early death.

Then around the 1950s, things started to shift again. Studies were coming out showing the importance of attachment, and beyond caring for physical wellbeing, mothers now had the additional responsibility for caring for her child’s emotional and psychological wellbeing. Child-rearing advice became more child-centred, with a heightened focus on a child’s needs and wants. Around the same time, ‘parenting’ entered our vocabularies, with ‘parent’ no longer simply describing your place in the family. It was now a verb, an occupation.

Time passed, and through the 1980s other cultural shifts began impacting how childhood was perceived. Neoliberalism was becoming firmly established, and with it came an increased sense of personal responsibility for self-optimisation and greater competition for success. By this time, agricultural and manufacturing jobs were on the decline, and more and more careers required a higher education degree. This shift to a knowledge-based economy meant that education was becoming progressively more valuable. Academic achievement had become a child’s chief responsibility, and promoting it was an important aspect of parental responsibility. The official discourse highlighted the ‘risk’ that parents and their children faced if their child were to fall behind in their education, and so parents felt increasing pressure to foster their child’s cognitive development.

Finally, George Bush, then President of the United States, declared the 1990s as the Decade of the Brain. New brain imaging techniques were leading to rapid advances in our understanding of neurobiology, and the importance of optimising brain development through early childhood was infiltrating the parenting literature. Policy makers and caregivers were now being sent messages about rapid synapse formation, critical periods in brain development, and the importance of enriching environments for optimal brain development. Indeed, there was anxiety that the first three years was a unique, biologically defined window of opportunity, during which the right experiences could enhance future success. And if the right opportunities weren’t available at the right time, too late, so sad, you’ve missed the boat.

The key question, though, isn’t what messages policy makers and parenting experts are pushing. It is, do parents believe these messages? Have daily parenting decisions been shaped by these cultural changes? To answer that question, Dr Ciara Smyth examined information presented to parents in common parenting magazines and ‘official’ government-sponsored parenting websites. She found that the message that parents are responsible for fostering their child’s cognitive development is pervasive across these media publications. Additionally, through face-to-face interviews with parents of pre-schoolers, she found that most parents have internalised this message, believing that they are responsible for fostering their child’s cognitive development. They do this through a variety of methods, including parenting for cognitive development (engaging in activities to promote school readiness, such as reading to their child and actively teaching them their letters and numbers), outsourcing for cognitive development (through enrolling them in preschool or daycare with the express intention of promoting their cognitive development and school readiness), and through concerted cultivation (enrolling their child in a range of structured activities, specifically for their enrichment or education). Parents are feeling intense pressure to optimise their children, and the pressure is starting young.

Ultimately, we have seen an extreme intensification over the course of a century as to what ‘good parenting’ means. The daily checklist is no longer: fed, watered, rested. It is now: fed, watered, rested, bathed, attached, educated, enriched.

Yet we need to ask, is the science underpinning this intensification valid?