Interview: What Would Big Bird Do?

Every child learns at their own rate. During the preschool years, children's job is to explore and investigate, and adults need to assist learning and facilitate it. I'm not going to say a child can't read by the age of 5. But developmentally, most children in kindergarten are learning the precursors of reading skills--they have sounds, they do the alphabet, they have rhyming--but they are not reading.

Then why do parents feel so pressured?

One reason may be No Child Left Behind. I don't think the intention was for this kind of hysteria. The idea of accountability is great. But I think it's turned into this testing issue, and there's a lot of pressure about testing and performance which I think might be leading to anxiety.

Is that what is spurring sales of all those videos for infants?

What's happening now is, everything is getting pushed down to a younger and younger age. There's pressure even on babies to begin achieving, so parents are buying these videos to make their infants "smarter." But there's no research that shows exposure to videos increases learning.

But aren't kids watching "Sesame Street" at younger and younger ages?