I am now 26 weeks pregnant and just learned that my baby has developed the ability to hear- not only me but also anyone I’m speaking to. At this point in my pregnancy, I’m amazed by my baby’s development and I’m shocked by the exorbitant amount of food that I can eat and still be hungry and the overwhelming abundance of companies that are telling me how to make my baby smarter…did I say baby? Oh, I meant fetus. Yes, there are companies out there selling products that they promise can help advance the intelligence of my unborn child. There are websites that promise to teach your fetus “25 words before they’re born”. And of course we’ve all heard the theories (thank you Baby Einstein) that playing classical music will help increase child development and prenatal development. (Incidentally, the famous “Mozart effect” phenomenon was based on a study showing improved spatial reasoning in college students in the 1990’s. Follow-up studies were not able to confirm the experiment’s results in adults or children.) Sadly, many of these companies claim to be based on research but the truth is that the research did not dictate product development. Really, it’s mostly a marketing gimmick- preying on parents who of course will do anything for their children.
I despise this. The initial idea for GoGo Lingo came out of research. I became obsessed, voraciously reading about the cognitive and linguistic processes that occur for children below the age of 8 and looked closely at the differences between monolingual and bilingual children. I read and debated not textbooks but the initial empirical studies that show how interactivity can improve learning. And I loved every minute of it. I am so energized by the fact that we have the tools to create something new that could be incredibly fun and effective and could help parents raise bilingual children.
I spent over a year just focusing on just the research- before I even began to decide exactly what GoGo Lingo would be. Research dictated the development of the website and music CD and it is why GoGo Lingo has many aspects to it- not just an online game but also a music CD (available really soon, I promise) because I know that for kids under the age of 3, sitting in front of a screen may not be the best thing. And I insisted on producing the CD so that parents could use it to introduce or reinforce the sounds of a foreign language to their kids, at any age without having to put them in front of a computer. Our goal is to eventually create many different tools that will help parents help their kids. Because unlike other claims, studies have already shown a positive link between knowing more than one language and creative thinking , problem solving skills, and higher scores on standardized tests. We know that learning a foreign language truly does have lifelong advantages for children.
Everything we’ve developed has been grounded in research. I don’t want to guilt or scare parents or start over-promising things. I’m not going to tell you that using GoGo Lingo will make your child bilingual or even fluent in Spanish because the truth is that learning a language is a process for which there is no single, magic bullet. And even though Patrick likes to speak to my belly every night in Portuguese, there is no evidence that that action alone is going to make my child more prone to the sounds of Portuguese than a baby born in an English speaking household. There is evidence that my baby may prefer to hear whatever languages we’ve been speaking, since he/she is familiar with those sounds but there is a big difference between preference and ability.
I’m all for giving your child advantages, but I think it is important for parents to drown out the marketing noise and decide which advantages really matter to them. I mean really, even if I could teach my fetus 25 words in the womb- will my child actually be any better off when he or she joins us?
What do you think?
