Push Parenting: Nine Out of Ten Experts Say So!

Excerpted from
No More Push Parenting: How to Find Success and Balance in a Hypercompetitive World
By Elisabeth Guthrie, M.D., Kathy Matthews

We push our children because "experts" have told us that it works. They're recommended optimum prenatal diets, baby brain stimulators, toddler enrichment programs, and the best, least damaging, way to say "no." Despite the fact that we're all grown up without such enhancements, we're come to believe that if we don's make the most of every developmental opportunity, beginning at conception, our children will fall behind.

We Americans are nothing if not new and improved. Sometimes it seems that the guiding principle of our lives is that we must get or be better. Most of us regularly feel the virtuous urge to join a health club, take a course, be a better friend, or get a better job. Unfortunately, many of us expect the same of our children-and we expect the road to improvement to begin in utero.

Thank goodness we all do have the urge to improve. It gets us up in the morning and keeps us, or most of us, from eating all our children's Halloween candy. Most of us could use some improvement. We are presumably mature and capable of making intellectual decisions about our goals in life and the price we will pay to achieve those goals. We know that giving up a daily chocolate may be painful, but the sacrifice could have a satisfying result: zipping up those stretch jeans. Babies, particularly embryos, are another story.

The truth is that much of what we believe when it comes to brain development and our ability to give our children superior mental powers is based on faulty or misguided conclusions from questionable research.

Once upon a time, when our parents were raising us, the general belief was that your genes determined how smart or dumb you were. In How the Mind Works, a book by C. Burt and others, published in 1934, the case was simply put: "By intelligence, the psychologist understands inborn, all-around intellectual ability. It is inherited, or at least innate, not due to teaching or training . . . Fortunately, it can be measured with accuracy and ease." Those were the days! Parents were off the hook. Except for marrying someone with great intellectual/ musical/athletic potential, there wasn't much they could do but stand back and watch their progeny achieve their destiny. What a relief.

Today's parents can only look back and wonder. We live in a world in which every aspect of a baby's development must be attended to, beginning with an optimum diet months before pregnancy begins. Women are encouraged to adopt preconception diets that will presumably stimulate the conception of a superior fetus. I once met a pregnant woman who had worked hard for the duration of her pregnancy to avoid any conflict with her husband because she was certain such "negative vibes" would harm her baby. On the one hand, we are fortunate to live in an era when the connection between nutrition and health is firmly established. We are also lucky to know that stress can negatively affect a fetus. On the other hand, no pregnant woman should ever have to be concerned that an occasional argument with a spouse would have any effect, negative or positive, on her baby.

Over the past two decades, some fascinating research has suggested that in utero a fetus can recognize its mothers voice. Some mothers, upon learning of this research and delighted with a specific way to enhance their baby's development, make a concerted effort to "speak" to their embryos in loving and affectionate phrases.

BebeSounds, manufactured by Unisar, appeals to this impulse. A listening and microphone device enables you to "listen, talk, and play music to your unborn baby." "Have a smarter baby," it claims. "Bond with your unborn baby. Increase your child's IQ and speed up your baby's motor development." The implication is that if you can make your baby smarter by talking directly to it, then perhaps you are making it duller by not doing so. It would seem to me that a fetus would benefit as much from overhearing statements like "Would you help me carry this to the car for a dollar?" or "Does this store have a ladies' room?"

It's the extrapolation from knowing a fetus recognizes a mother's voice to deciding that it's an obligation to speak directly to the fetus that can push future moms over the edge.

Or consider music in utero. You've probably heard of the "Mozart Effect," a term coined by French physician Alfred Tomatis. In 1993 a University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh research project "proved," or so it was reported, that listening to music by Mozart aids in the development of cognitive skills, including spatial reasoning. The fact that this study was based on college students, and that its results were later called into question, has done little to change the public's mind: You can make your baby smarter by playing Mozart to it from the time of conception. A few years ago, Money magazine reported that Newark Community School for the Arts in New Jersey offered a seventy-dollar music course for babies still languishing in the womb. The dutiful pregnant moms gathered to expose their fetuses to the brain-enhancing strains of Mozart and Vivaldi.

In 1996, Dr. Craig Ramey at the University of Alabama reported to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science that infant stimulation beginning as early as six weeks could increase babies' scores on intelligence tests by fifteen to thirty percent. This was front-page news in the San Francisco Chronicle. But if after delivery you're too tired to do the stimulating yourself, you can rely on the "Stim-Mobile" ("an intelligent mobile [as opposed to those dumb ones], it promises to give you a more alert, more content, quieter baby"). The leaflet, "What Can a Baby See?," included with the Stim-Mobile claims "Research indicates that infants given a visually enriched environment are less fussy and are more frequently quiet and attentive when awake than infants who are not given special stimulation .. . Babies given these kinds of stimulation show sustained developmental advantages over infants in less stimulating environments."

If a fetus can be taught to appreciate Mozart, an infant's IQ can be boosted with a mobile, and a toddler can be taught to play violin and speak French, then why not? Wouldn't children who had been given all these gifts be better prepared to live a richer, fuller life? And wouldn't they also, not inconsequentially, be extremely successful as they graduated from the best schools, developed the best resumes, and found the top-paying jobs?