Yesterday I received an e-mail from a young female college student who was working part time as a baby sitter for a 7-month-old baby boy. She has read some of my books and wrote for advice because she was concerned about what the mother of this baby boy is asking her to do. She wrote:

“A couple of weeks ago the baby’s grandmother, who also baby sits the boy, approached me to relate that the baby’s mom had complained to her that the baby wasn’t meeting certain hoped for developmental milestones (hoped for as a result of peer pressure from parents of other infants and the insidious evil, in my opinion, of comparisons) waving bye bye, clapping, identifying body parts. The grandmother reported that the baby’s mom told her that if we (the two babysitters) weren’t going to work consistently with the baby (systematically teach the baby via frequent repetitions throughout the day) then the mother would have to put the baby in a preschool a couple of days a week.”

Apparently this pressure on the part of the mother arose in part because she had read the book, How to Raise a Smarter Child: Build a Better Brain and increase IQ up to Thirty Points by David Perlmutter and Carol Colman. I am familiar with this book and many others of the same ilk. In my reply to the college student, I told her that there is absolutely no research to support these claims about the brain or about raising the IQ, and that she should make this clear to the mother. With respect to brain growth, there is simply no research regarding brain growth in infants in relation to amount of stimulation. Such research would be unethical because of over stimulation that could potentially do harm. You cannot deliberately put children at risk. Animal research does not provide any support for the benefits of over-stimulation on infant brains.

With respect to IQ again there are no studies which show that babies growing up in a normal expectable environment, such as the baby in question, will have an increase in IQ as a result of over-stimulation. Consider the following analogy. If you have an undernourished child and put him or her on a full calorie, well balanced diet, that baby will make significant improvements in height and weight. But if you take an already well nourished baby and give him or her more food, the only result will be a fat and unhealthy baby. The same holds true for the IQ, children from very deprived environments will make IQ gains, when placed in an intellectually stimulating environment. But most middle class children are already in such an environment, so adding additional stimulation will do little good and has the potential for doing harm.

Those who write books for parents and who promise better brains and higher IQ’s in infants whose parents follow their advice, simply prey upon parental vulnerabilities. There is no scientific evidence to support these claims and much evidence to negate them. All authors write books in hopes of selling them. But most authors also respect their readers and try to play fair with them. It seems to me that those who write books like “How to Raise a Smarter Baby by Kindergarten” lack the second author characteristic.