Making the womb a classroom
Makers of prenatal learning devices claim to enhance fetal development
WASHINGTON—For the first half of her pregnancy, Suzanne Ling played classical music for her unborn child whenever she drove her car. She had heard about “the Mozart effect” from a friend, who swore that classical music soothed her baby both pre-and post-delivery.
Around week 20, Ling discovered BabyPlus, an egg-shaped device that she wore around her growing abdomen. The device played 16 “audio lessons” of heartbeat-like tones and promised to teach a fetus to recognize patterns and differentiate sounds. After baby Alexander was born, Ling was certain that he was especially engaged, aware and smart. She is convinced that his exposure to the in utero “lessons” will help him avoid two conditions she fears: autism and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Alexander, her first child, is now 1z ye 1/2 r 1/3 old.
BabyPlus is one of a small number of “prenatal learning systems” being marketed to expectant parents these days. With such names as Lullabelly, Bellysonic and FirstSounds, they offer up everything from soothing tones to foreign languages as they promise anxious parents a better, calmer baby. Yet even as some parents pay upward of $100 for these devices, experts say there is no proof, no scientific studies, to support the claims.
“It probably won’t do any good, and it can in fact be harmful,” said Janet DiPietro, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University who has studied fetal development for 20 years. But, she added, many people “don’t understand that anyone can say anything they want on that label and it’s not vetted anyplace and those products are not [Food and Drug Administration]- regulated in any way.”
Head start for baby?
Measuring the effect of one of these devices is difficult. After all, how can you tell whether your baby would have turned out less smart or alert without a prenatal learning system? A recent study in the journal Child Development found that fetuses, starting at 30 weeks, can acclimate to sounds over time and that they develop memory at 34 weeks. But does that suggest that the learning proposed by BabyPlus and other devices can occur?
Jan Nijhuis, a Dutch obstetriciangynecologist who conducted the study, hesitates to make a correlation. “How could that be proven?” he wrote in an e-mail. “It is questionable why one would interfere with the natural environment of the fetus, who is busy enough.”
People agree on this much: Starting at 18 weeks, fetuses can listen to the mother’s heartbeat, voices and other noises of daily life. Makers of prenatal learning devices say that the period between 18 and 40 weeks is an opportunity to give soon-to-be-born babies a head start. (The Baby- Plus slogan? “Your womb . . . the perfect classroom.”)
Yet DiPietro and others say evolution has already created the ideal environment for the complicated human brain to develop—a mother’s womb—and messing with that system is silly . . . or possibly dangerous. The devices could damage a baby’s hearing and disrupt its sleep, Di- Pietro says. “Fetuses are almost always asleep. Here, you are introducing a stimulus to them while they’re asleep. This is akin to taking your newborn, and when they’re asleep in a bassinet, blasting Mozart at them. That’s exactly what you’re doing with these devices.”
Quieter than heartbeat
Lisa Jarrett, whose company sells BabyPlus, says the device is set to a safe, unadjustable volume 40 decibels quieter than the mother’s heartbeat. Jarrett first heard about the idea in the early 1990s when her husband, a reproductive endocrinologist, showed her a magazine article. The author, Brent Logan, who had no medical or scientific training, studied 12 babies who had gone through an in utero “curriculum” he devised; he wrote that simple rhythms boosted their cognitive development.
Logan says his interest in prenatal learning was sparked around 1980 when he saw pregnant women using the then-new Sony Walkman to pipe in music to their unborn children. So, he did his own study of what kind of sounds came into the womb.
“We were astonished,” he says. “You could hear everything outside —speaking, television, radio, honking horns, dogs, but it was muffled, like listening underwater.”
From this, he concluded that there was a way to provide specific stimulation to babies during gestation that would have a positive effect once they were born. He developed a version of the BabyPlus device, using cassettes to deliver 16 audio lessons of increasing complexity in rhythm and tone.
Jarrett, who once worked at an in-vitro fertilization laboratory, sent away for the cassette tapes when she was pregnant with her first child and used them with subsequent ones. They were all calm babies, good nursers and hit their pediatric milestones early, she says. “The way they learned was efficient.”
So she licensed the rights for BabyPlus, which is now sold in more than 60 countries.
Jarrett acknowledges that the effects provided by BabyPlus have not been proven, but she says a clinical trial, funded in part by her company’s new nonprofit arm and set to start in November, will look at prenatal auditory stimuli. She expects it to support the theories behind her device.
Developers of the strap-on Ritmo audio belt have the same conviction. The system was spawned in part by interest in the controversial “Mozart effect,” which was coined in 1993 after a University of Wisconsin psychologist published a study suggesting that college students performed better on parts of an IQ test after listening to classical music. Ritmo allows expectant mothers to play music (or anything else) to their growing fetus.
Harmful or helpful
Joan Loveland, an obstetriciangynecologist with offices in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia, says one or two of her patients have inquired about prenatal education systems in the past few years, enough to inspire her to do some research.
“I tell patients it’s an intriguing idea, but it’s hard to know what the overall benefits will be,” Loveland said. “I say we don’t have any evidence that it’s harmful or helpful, but it’s probably fine, if you want to spend that kind of money.”
Loveland said: “Do we really need our fetuses to be in a classroom, or is it enough for them just to be fetuses? Can’t we just appreciate that what nature is doing is so brilliant and so enormous that it’s enough? I do worry that this stress will rob people of the joy of being pregnant. And that’s a shame.”
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