They say a picture is worth 1,000 words, but what happens those words are meant to mislead parents?
We’ll
talk about the science of this in a moment, but may I just complain that one of
the largest, most powerful, corporations in the world sells products which are
obviously designed to trick consumers and which are obviously useless?
The Baby
Kids Tablet Educational Toy does not include a particularly dynamic product
description, its page claims that it is a “multifunctioning learning toy pad” which
helps kids “easily win at the starting line.” It also claims to have “screen
touch control” which sets off a red flag of the product evoking a touch screen
while swapping the word as a legal defense. While the marketing remains vague,
I found a helpful YouTube video reviewing a similar product; I do not speak
Hindi but I am very grateful to this content creator for showing what the toy
looks like and what it does:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBf0PUvFiuo&ab_channel=SahiBUY
It is
just a chunk of plastic that says things connected to the various buttons on
the fake screen. “A for apple” type stuff. While a normally developed B.S.
detector can spot most of the issues here without going into depth, it is
worthwhile to develop that intuition by going into how this product is
wrong in the context of marketing and the pseudoscience it proports.
An
overview of infant development (Fogel, 2014) reveals the first point of audacity
in this image: this “baby kid,” per the product description, cannot read or
even comprehend the concept. Let us estimate that the child here is twelve
months old. Infants do not begin to speak their first words until approximately
9-12 months of age (pg. 304), they cannot carry a dialogue even at twenty-four
months (pg. 413), and in a separate survey of 1,023 parents the earliest
reported age for beginning to read was 3.5 years old (Kern & Friedman,
2008). There is a good chance that the pictured baby cannot even speak beyond
“mama,” much less engage in ideas like the alphabet (infants at this age are
only just beginning to grasp the basic concept of cause and effect (Fogel,
2014, pg. 287)). In fact, the marketers knew how ridiculous their product
is; compare our first image:
To the
marketing used on a different, slightly sketchier, website:
https://www.oio-7.top/ProductDetail.aspx?iid=90947950&pr=34.99
Who
knows why the price has tripled here, but note how the infant in question is
posed in the exact same position: arms and neck and so on, but if we look
closer:
Walmart
Dorno
We can
see, amongst other amateurish photo editing mistakes, that the “tablet” in
question has been placed there digitally; see the gap between the baby and the
toy in the first and second pictures and how it shifts? Notice, also, in the
above picture (the Walmark photo) how it looks like the baby’s knee is oddly
shaped and convex and how the cut aligns with where the tablet lies in the
lower photo (Dorno)? Even the makers of the product do not bother giving
children their useless toy.
It is so telling that the infant in question sits here alone in this picture. “I would like my child to succeed, but I am too busy trying to succeed myself, so I will buy this hunk of plastic for them,” is the core of the marketing pitch. I cannot help but compare the inferred laziness and cynicism of this approach to the hard work done by scientists to actually understand the connection between early reading and success in life. Kern and Friedman put together more than 7,000 words of analysis on the Terman Life Cycle Study, which was a longitudinal study which focused specifically on gifted children. This created a massive storehouse of data on participants whose information was sampled every five to ten years. This gave Kern and Friedman a rich dataset to do their analysis about educational milestones and success. Luckily, given the terrible reviews and lack of apparent traffic on the product pages, our Fake Baby iPads and the marketing ethos seems to be losing out to parents who are dedicated and loving, who are more interested in the truth, like Kern and Friedman, than a inevitably flawed (and if it is used to replace methods which actually work, potentially damaging) easy fix; it is too bad that Walmart seems to support the latter.
Ethically, perhaps the biggest problem with the marketing is its pitch that it will help kids “easily win at the starting line.” It takes advantage of a common desire, to want one’s children to succeed at life, but totally obfuscates the methodology to accomplish this. It is true that learning to read at an early age is associated with better success in school, and even a longer life (Kern & Friedman, 2008), but trying to automate this learning using the aesthetics of high tech removes the most important element: parents directly involving themselves in the teaching process (Hulme & Snowling, 2015).
Kern and Friedman did not find a magic bullet which creates “gifted” children, the idea that one can “easily win at the starting line” is a lie, and parents should not waste money on a product like this. Parents should save the $10 plus shipping and spend an extra hour with their kids, it’ll do good for both of them.
References
Fogel, A. (2014). Infancy: Infant, family and
society.
Hulme, C., &
Snowling, M. J. (2015). Learning to Read: What We Know and What We Need to
Understand Better. Child development perspectives, 7(1),
1–5. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12005
Kern ML, Friedman
HS. (2008) Early educational milestones as predictors of lifelong academic
achievement, midlife adjustment, and longevity. J Appl Dev Psychol.
2008;30(4):419-430. doi: 10.1016/j.appdev.2008.12.025.
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