This part of the midterm came about after we listened to the story of the Better Baby Institute, a place that claims to give you a method to teach your child to read, learn foreign languages, play music, even do math problems that no ordinary person could hope to accomplish. Our professor has appeared on several programs to dispute the claims of this sort of place. This essay is on why people are so drawn to places like this despite their dubious claims.

1. Parents are, of course, drawn to the early years entirely too much. Human nature dictates the various psychological motivations behind parents' desire to improve their children in the early years; society reinforces these beliefs through media representations.

Parents can have any number of reasons for being drawn to the Better Baby Institute and its brethren. The optimistic viewpoint holds that parents want the best for their children, and feel that they cannot afford to miss this sort of opportunity, especially with "proven" results. These parents are trying to give their children an edge in a fiercely competitive world. The flip side of this is those parents who enroll in this program for all the wrong reasons - to mold their child into a particular vision they may have, to live vicariously through their children, to "keep up with the Joneses" - all manner of less-than-sterling motives.

Regardless of their true motivation, all parents are essentially trying to do one thing: give their child or children every advantage in a culture that, increasingly, judges people by their intelligence. Literacy is more crucial to our culture than it has ever been throughout history - and the Better Baby Institute offers to teach your child to read early and well! Math, science, and computers are the jobs which hold both money and a measure of prestige in this culture - and the Better Baby Institute claims to have your child doing mathematical equations you yourself couldn't do without a calculator and an instruction book! Modern communications makes it possible for a budding garage band to publish their songs electronically and become an instant sensation - and the Better Baby Institute will teach your child to play an instrument!

Although the intellectual elite (defined here as those with IQ's of approximately 147 or greater, commonly defined as "potential genius") has never ruled the world, it certainly controls it. Our lives are defined by science and technology. What parent would - could- in good conscience deny their child an opportunity to be in the upper crust, to be a Nobel prize-winning scientist, a groundbreaking mathematician to be compared to Einstein, or any number of other pipe dreams.

The media fuels this controversy in several ways. First, its method of reporting research has led to the common perceptions of the effect of nurturing. Many parents have come to believe that they can override the natural constrictions of physiology with sufficient care and effort - this mindset is obvious in those parents who think that "patterning" for a disabled child will somehow cure the child and allow it to live a normal life. With every report on the correlation between parental reading and intelligence, or what have you, parents leap into the fray with both feet, following the policy that "more is better" while failing to account for diminishing returns. The media has also encouraged the perception of early childhood as a critical period for growth. This is not intentional; it is simply a repercussion of how they report. Early childhood is, in fact, a critical period for many activities - language, for example. The media demonstrates this, leaving parents with a "use it or lose it" impression generalized to almost everything. The idea of a young brain being more plastic, the concept of unused brain cells dying, the stories of children's ability to learn - these are what parents see, and what they make their judgments on. Is it any wonder that they conclude that early childhood is the critical period for all learning?

The problem with the Better Baby Institute and its ilk is that they don't really have the answer they claim to. They promise that their methods will produce results - but in fact, as Glenn Doman himself admitted during the interview, the actual secret is simply parents paying attention to their child, helping them learn and guiding them. In short, parents should be parents. Unfortunately, many parents prefer the quick-fix solution, looking for a "magic formula" to make their children better without much real effort on their behalf.

As a future parent, I too feel the seductive call of the Better Baby Institute. I know its claims and principles are false, yet a part of myself chides me for passing up an opportunity to give my children a chance to be better than they ordinarily would. Of course, this part of my is stupid, so I will ignore it. I think the best thing I could do for my children is to be a parent - to invest time, effort, and love into them. Humanity has existed for millennia without the Better Baby Institute; Copernicus, Plato, Einstein - none of them attended a Better Baby Institute. I like to think that, just because one suddenly exists, we won't abruptly be unable to raise our children without it.