Local Author Explores How TV Became Baby's Best Friend

by Dade Hayes

(May 15, 2008) Moving back to my hometown of Larchmont last year to raise two children offered a lot of benefits, especially compared with the Shiners’ circus act of squeezing into a three-room apartment on the Upper West Side. But as much as I relished introducing Margot and Finley to the still-excellent Mamaroneck schools, the beckoning Sound, and their own actual backyard, one thing had changed radically since my own childhood: television. Put simply, it starts far earlier and extends deeper into every corner of childhood via DVDs, the Internet and licensed toys. Understanding the $21 billion business of entertaining babies and toddlers has been my preoccupation as both author and father for the past two years. The result is my new book, ANYTIME PLAYDATE: Inside the Preschool Entertainment Boom, or, How Television Became My Baby’s Best Friend, just published by Free Press/Simon & Schuster.

Like a lot of people facing the skull-scrambling feeling of new-parent jetlag, my wife, Stella, and I turned to TV – in moderation at first - as a supplement. My early mornings with Margot and Sesame Street offered the simple pleasures of an uninterrupted cup of coffee and the notion of passing down a pop-culture heirloom to the next generation. Unlike my more skeptical wife, I was open to the upside of TV in large part because my dad has worked in the business as a local news director for more than 30 years. (When I was growing up in Larchmont, he worked at WNBC-TV.)

Margot is entranced by the TV while her parents enjoy their morning paper.

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 24-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 pre-parenthood 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. Revenue from TV programs, DVDs, CDs, stage shows, magazines and tie-in toys every year has nearly tripled since 2001. In that watershed year, the Walt Disney Co. 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 9 million viewers each morning, more than Today or Good Morning America. A recent survey by the non-profit 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 what they call “age 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, BabyFirst TV (aimed, incredibly, at children aged 6 to 36 months), Baby TV 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 50 shows every day vie for the 2-5-year-old audience. 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 U.S. (51 million units) was intended for the pacifier crowd.

Nielsen, the TV ratings company, has no reliable method of tracking viewers under 2 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 2 watch TV daily; 42 percent begin watching before they turn 1; 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. Bureau of Census projects the annual birth rate to grow by 20 percent over the next generation, from 4 million now to 4.8 million in 2028. In 2006, the birth rate was the highest it has been since 1961.

How exactly do conglomerates target the ultra-young? Are they pushing ethical boundaries to do so? And what happens on the receiving end of the transaction – in the living room, where the marketing messages and parental choices are made manifest? That is what I set out to explore, frustrated by the lack of existing literature on the subject. Books written on this topic to date have generally been finger-wagging polemics with forbidding titles like The Plug-in Drug or Endangered Minds. I wanted to write a revealing book that would take readers behind the scenes while also considering my own family and the conflicting scientific research into the effects it was having on children.

My quest took me to London, where I met Anne Wood, controversial creator of Teletubbies, and Denver, where Baby Einstein’s creator welcomed me to her home. Mostly, though, I explored New York, which, since the days of Howdy Doody has been the epicenter of children’s television. I interviewed more than 100 production executives, researchers, creators and child-development experts and followed one preschool show, Nickelodeon’s Ni Hau, Kai-lan, from concept to broadcast. The show premiered in February.

Parents at Margot’s preschool at St. John’s, along with other friends, have asked what writing the book changed about the way we are raising Margot’s 14-month-old brother, Finley. More precisely, they want to know whether I concluded that TV is good or bad for little kids. In short, I found plenty to be alarmed about but also plenty to be encouraged by. TV is neither inherently good nor bad. It is simply a medium. We just focus on seeking out quality programs and watching in moderation, aiming for no more than an hour a day. Though come to think of it, we still haven’t taken Finley to Sesame Street.

Dade Hayes is New York bureau chief of Variety.

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