Your Baby Can Read, But Should She? Early Learning and the Commodification of Literacy

• In Event: Roundtable Session 39
  In Roundtable Session: Cultural Studies of Children: Critical Perspectives on Childhoods, Popular Culture, and Consumerism

Abstract

Current trends in the consumer economy of the United States have raised concerns about marketers openly targeting babies and toddlers as a lucrative market demographic. Today, a number of internationally marketed educational products target children from birth to age two. Among these commodities is the Your Baby Can Read program, which, over the last several years, has been marketed via an extensive cable television and radio campaign. While “common sense” dictates that the ability to read would be valuable to acquire at any age, we believe there are serious and previously unexamined implications relating to the commodification of literacy for infant consumption. We critically analyze the Your Baby Can Read program and similar products in the context of both historical and contemporary scholarship on early childhood development and pedagogies of consumption.

In order to understand the potential implications of the Your Baby Can Read program, we adopt de Certeau’s (1984) notion of everyday practices of consumption and its resistance. De Certeau (1984, xiv) suggests that exposing and articulating everyday practices affords consumers an opportunity to reclaim agency from the ubiquitous forces of commercial culture. Such an investigation renders public otherwise private meanings derived from cultural artifacts.
Drawing on both traditional and contemporary research on learning and curriculum and consumer culture, we examine the concept of literacy within the context of public pedagogy and commercial culture and investigate how high-stakes, commodified literacy impacts the ways in which children, youth, and adults learn within public spaces. Through the lenses of cultural and curriculum studies, we examine this consumer product using a process of critical textual analysis (McKee, 2003).

In this study, the Your Baby Can Read video series is the primary source for analysis. Through critical textual analysis, we conduct a “reading” of the product and its implications by deconstructing the videos, literature, and advertisements for the product in order to examine the implicit messages about consumption and its connection to child rearing and development. Additionally, we advance a postmodern critique of a consumer model of early literacy, utilizing Jean Baudrillard’s (2001) “account of the postmodern proliferation of signs and the transformation of the sign into a commodity.”

The results of our critical analysis indicate that infant literacy as a consumer product is not only spurious in terms of the benefits it extends to babies, but may be detrimental to the very notion of “literacy” itself. The program offers, through repetitive videos and flash cards designed to teach rote recognition of decontextualized words, a gross oversimplification of the complex process of reading and linguistic development. By purchasing the program, parents are perpetuating, participating in, and enculcating their children into the system of objects/ system of consumption, which is “the most impoverished of languages, full of signification and empty of meaning. It is a language of signals” (Baudrillard, 2001, p. 20).
Our examination of a cultural artifact advances the argument that critical pedagogies of consumption are needed in order to more clearly comprehend the implications of consumption in our daily lives

Authors

• Jennifer April Sandlin, Arizona State University

• Julie Garlen Maudlin, Georgia Southern University