Susan Gregory Thomas, Buy, Buy, Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds, Houghton Mifflin: 2007. $25 in hardback.

There's a tremendous amount of "educational" toys on the market for children today. But recently, author Susan Gregory Thomas noticed that the age range for these toys has been getting younger and younger. Now, toys are marketed to children as young as 6 months. And why? Because parents believe the marketing copy that tells them these toys will make their kid learn better and faster. Everyone wants their kid to have a leg up; if the kid is behind everyone else, she won't get into a good preschool, which means she won't get into a good Montessori school, which means she won't get into that private high school, she won't go to Stanford, and she'll never become the president. Damn, better buy this kid a LeapPad!

But the marketing copy is based on nebulous or non-existent research. What more research shows is that children under 1 year don't learn anything from "educational" toys or television shows. What they do learn are characters and brand names that will become familiar to them later in life. Introducing children early on to LeapFrog products or Elmo insures that they will continue to spend money on those products and, when they have their own children, will buy the Elmo-branded toys instead of the Thomas the Tank Engines.

Through 200 disturbing pages, Thomas shows us how marketing companies see the word "educational" as nothing more than another technique to get parents to purchase their products. "Educational" is in as parents try to make Baby learn fourteen languages not by speaking them in the home but by showing them psychedelic patterns through Baby Einstein. Thomas concludes that most of the products don't work, that the science behind them is flawed or missing, and that Baby will grow up just fine without listening to Mozart. If anything, she learns that introducing children to television at a young age can be harmful, as infants learn language best by being spoken to by living humans, not TV shows.