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  In subsequent examination, the young inmates were found to be severely compromised, often having low IQ and suffering from a constellation of psychological, neurological, and biological impairments. The Romanian orphans were like songbirds raised in isolation. They could make noises, but they couldn’t sing.

  “When the child vocalizes and the caregiver responds, the child becomes a partner in the language experience. In an institutional setting, harried caregivers who are responsible for changing a room full of children cannot make time to respond to the communication attempts of each child. As a result, the infant eventually stops trying to communicate,” write Charles A. Nelson, Nathan A. Fox, and Charles H. Zeanah in Romania’s Abandoned Children, their powerful account of a landmark twelve-year study of these children and efforts to rehabilitate them.

  The orphanages of Bucharest offer a distressing illustration of the damage that can be done to children if grown-ups don’t engage with them. It’s a reminder that babies don’t come into the world destined to express and master themselves. They need the people around them to kindle their little brains and show them the way.

  * * *

  CAN TECHNOLOGY HELP with this?

  Yes—but also no.

  Yes, parents can buy apps and games that promise to stimulate their infants’ brains. Lively programs and child-friendly devices purport to be able to teach babies and small children their colors, their math facts, and the principles of sustainable ecology. According to Parents magazine, which you’d think would know, “Fun and kid-friendly iPhone applications keep your tot busy and learning on the go.” Parents.com promises that “your child’s education doesn’t have to stop after school,” because “games made for your iPhone, iPad, and Android will keep your youngster’s mind active outside the classroom.”

  These claims are seductive, but there’s one thing the purveyors of electronic toys and child-oriented tech would rather not say. In truth, their products are inferior. They are no match for us. There is no genius in Silicon Valley who has yet devised a machine half as effective for teaching and nurturing the young mind as a flawed, fallible, physically present human being. A real mother who talks and reads picture books beats a Little Mommy Talk with Me Repeating Doll™ every time.

  Numerous experiments bear this out. In 2010, a team at the University of Virginia investigated the effect of a bestselling DVD that promised to teach vocabulary to infants. For the study, the team enlisted ninety-six families with babies and toddlers between the ages of twelve and eighteen months, and divided them into three groups. In the first cohort, parents watched the DVD with their children. In the second, the babies watched by themselves. Participants in the third group did not view the DVD, but the parents were asked to introduce the target vocabulary words during normal conversation with their children.

  One month later, the researchers tested all ninety-six babies, and discovered that the video had no pedagogical value whatsoever. It didn’t matter if the child had watched the DVD alone or with a parent. The words simply did not travel from the pixelated screen to the infant mind. Interestingly, the babies who didn’t watch the DVD, but instead heard the words spoken by their parents, were able to pick them up.

  Another study that same year at Northwestern University, also involving ninety-six babies, tested the efficacy of videos with purported educational value and came to similar conclusions: there was no evidence that babies learned from the screens. A 2007 study concluded that infants and young children learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words for each hour of baby DVDs they watched than babies who saw no videos at all.

  According to Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, a professor of applied psychology at New York University, “One of the reasons kids don’t learn from media, from technology, is that there’s not contingency,” the spontaneous, fluid adaptation to what a child seems to be understanding or failing to understand. As director of the university’s Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education, Tamis-LeMonda spends a lot of time observing small children, and like many in her field, she worries that in our culture’s infatuation with technology, we’re not yet getting the balance right.

  * * *

  WE KNOW, IN adult life, that when the screen comes on, the amount of spoken give-and-take tends to dwindle. It’s always a bad sign for general conversation when someone pulls out his phone to show everyone a funny video or to read an outrageous tweet. In the fumbling moment between the thought—Oh, I have to show these guys—and the electronic summoning—Wait, it’s loading, just a sec—there’s a stalling of momentum.

  We know that technoference is a real issue for many children. It can be distressing to lose a parent’s attention to electronic interruption, and some kids misbehave because of it. For there to be an interruption, of course, two people have to be engaged with one another in the first place. But what if that engagement is happening less often, or not at all? Is technology smothering some parent-child interactions before they even have a chance to begin?

  For a glimpse of a child’s perspective, in 2015 researchers at the University of Arizona, Flagstaff, evaluated the ways that families behaved with different kinds of toys. They wanted to see which toys fostered the liveliest chatter between parents and young toddlers. The researchers made in-home audio recordings of twenty-six pairs of parents and children between the ages of ten and sixteen months. Each family was given three sets of playthings: electronic toys (a baby laptop, a baby cellphone, and a talking farm), traditional toys (a chunky wooden puzzle, a shape-sorter, and rubber blocks with pictures), and five board books featuring farm animals, shapes, and colors.

  If you’ve ever planned to “just check email for a minute” and realized with a jolt that you’ve been disengaged from your surroundings for an hour, you may be able to guess what the Arizona researchers observed. With the electronic toys, the amount of parental chatting and infant vocalizing plummeted. The machines made the noises, the people were silent. There was a bit more talking when the children played with the traditional toys. But the best object of all for eliciting back-and-forth exchanges was a picture book. Reading a board book with a baby turns out to be far more effective than both traditional toys and electronic entertainment in creating an environment rich with words and language.

  “These results provide a basis for discouraging the purchase of electronic toys that are promoted as educational,” the researchers wrote, and “add to the large body of evidence supporting the potential benefits of book reading with very young children.”

  One reason baby books are so helpful in this regard might seem to be so obvious as to scarce merit mentioning: books contain words. (Well, of course they do!) But there is more to it than that. Board books in general do not have a great number of words. Often there’s no more than one word to a page, or no words at all, just pictures. It’s in the interaction with the book that the word-magic happens. To return to the example of Peek-a-Boo!, the child on the lap will hear the language of the printed text, read by an adult, but also the talking that results from the sight of the pictures. Coming to an illustration of the baby in his high chair, a parent might naturally make a few remarks about the scene: “What’s that baby doing? Is he eating his breakfast? Look, he has a spoon in his mouth.” This sort of chatter is a huge help to babies as they begin to pick up the rhythms of vernacular speech, which, as Dante observed, is everyone’s first language.

  To understand why in-person conversation is so constructive—and why screens fail at the task—it may be helpful to consider what happens when babies are taught not a native language, which is the air around them, but a foreign language. In 2003 a team of clinicians at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences found that babies from English-speaking families were able to learn words in Mandarin Chinese if they were taught by live, interactive experimenters. These babies were indifferent to and unable to learn from teachers who appeared on screens and who were unresponsive—in other words, not contingent. Twelve y
ears later, the researchers discovered something else. They found for the first time a demonstrated link between a baby’s acquisition of the sounds of a foreign language and the direction of the child’s gaze.

  Babies tend to be around two months old when they begin to make eye contact. (It is a thrilling moment for parents: We are seen!) By six months, about half of babies will engage in gaze shifting; that is, they can make eye contact and then follow the other person’s gaze to take in whatever he or she is looking at. This is one of a baby’s earliest social behaviors, and by twelve months almost all babies will do it. (Autistic babies may follow their own time lines in this regard.)

  In the study, seventeen infants from English-speaking households, all of them nine and a half months old, were given a dozen Spanish lessons over the course of a month. During each twenty-five-minute session, the tutors introduced toys, read aloud, and chatted in a cheery, interactive way, always in Spanish. The babies wore electroencephalography (EEG) headbands fitted with sensors snugly around their heads. The headgear allowed the researchers to measure the babies’ brain activity, while, from the outside, during the first and final sessions, they counted how often the infants shifted their gaze between their interlocutor and the object the adult was showing them.

  “How well infants are able to shift their gaze coordinates with their language development and predicts how large their vocabulary will be when they’re older,” one of the study’s coauthors, Rechele Brooks, later told an interviewer.

  The brain has a pattern of recognition when they notice, “Oh, you said something new?” Babies in the study were better able to recognize the Spanish sounds. And the babies who have been shifting their gaze more often during play with the actual people were better able to recognize the different speech sounds when we tested their brain reaction. In other words, they had learned the new sounds of the new language, and we were able to recognize it by reading their brain waves during the study.

  Watching video excerpts, I was struck by the tenderness of the experiment. It is one thing to talk of studies and findings and the cold statistical implications of one intervention or another. It’s quite another to see a small girl sitting on her bottom in that sturdy, pudding-like way babies have, tipping her head in curiosity as a smiling clinician, also seated on the floor, shows her a yellow rubber duck, and then a pretend slice of bread. The girl takes the bread and turns it in her soft little palms, wondering at it. The experimenter, a young woman with a ponytail, leans forward as she chats in Spanish. She taps the bread, as if pointing out its artificiality. She meets the girl’s inquiring gaze when the child waves the toy above her head.

  “Pan,” the young woman confirms. “Pan de jugar.” The soft sound of the phrase in Spanish is nothing like the sharper English pronunciation—“toy bread,” or “pretend bread”—and having heard it in such a gentle, interactive setting, it makes sense that the girl would indeed remember the sounds when it came time for her vocab test.

  Something else is happening in that scene. In exploring an object together, communicating through the voice and through eye contact, the young woman and the child have embarked on a period of what is known as “joint attention.” This is a phenomenon that for children has a remarkable tempering power.

  * * *

  IN 1934, A young psychologist died of tuberculosis in Moscow. His name was Lev Vygotsky, and he left this world believing that in his work he had glimpsed, like Moses, a promised land he would never enter. For many decades his thinking had little influence in the West, but since the 1980s, after his writing was translated, his fingerprints have been all over our understanding of child development. Vygotsky believed that play is for children a crucial mechanism for self-discovery. He also believed, signal to our purposes here, that language is a vital tool for a child learning to regulate his emotions and behaviors, and to establish relationships with others. The more adept a child becomes with words, the sooner he can handle himself.

  We don’t think of babies and toddlers as creatures who can self-regulate. Popular stereotype suggests the opposite: picture a cartoon baby screaming for attention, rays of outrage shooting off his plump Looney Tunes body; or a toddler meltdown, a scribbled hurricane of inchoate rage and frustration. Even if real children seldom resemble the monsters of caricature, there’s an element of truth here. As babies and young children grow, they do need to learn to govern their emotions and impulses, to get along with others, and to focus and pay attention. These and other executive-function skills, such as mental flexibility and the capacity to retain information, as well as persistence—grit, or stick-to-it-iveness—are not merely helpful a little later, when children get to school, but important skills for navigating the long business of life.

  One of the best ways to help small children maximize these capacities is to read picture books with them, early and often. As one academic team has noted, “Children benefit when they and their parent establish a positive pattern of relating while reading,” not least because they “learn to naturally regulate their attention when they are focusing on a task they find interesting in a context that is nurturing, warm, and responsive.” Storybooks are less like medicine, in this context, than like vitamin supplements that fortify. (Fast-paced TV shows, meanwhile, have been shown significantly to impair executive function in young children after as little as nine minutes.)

  We can get a glimpse of the effect of picture books on children’s emotional regulation through work done at twenty-two Head Start centers in central Pennsylvania a decade ago. Teachers incorporated a read-aloud scheme that included teaching the alphabet and asking children lots of questions. In the stories, children encountered characters in exasperating situations who were able to model desirable behaviors. For instance, a bright green turtle named Twiggle showed the children how, when he was angry, he would retreat into his shell, take three deep breaths, describe what had upset him, and then articulate his feelings about it. Low-income children enrolled in the centers that used this protocol were shown to make significant improvements in the development of executive function.

  “The lesson teaches them to take a time out from their emotions, to avoid acting impulsively,” Dr. Karen Bierman, who created the protocol with her colleagues at Pennsylvania State University, said at the time. “Stating what’s bothering them, and how they feel, is the basis for self-control and problem solving in stressful social situations.”

  In 2011, David Dickinson of Vanderbilt University and three colleagues wrote a paper, “How Reading Books Fosters Language Development Around the World.” Mustering a cavalcade of evidence, the authors observed, as Vygotsky envisioned, that language “seems to make it easier for children to regulate their own thoughts, feelings, and actions or abilities that are essential to social development and school success.”

  “The acquisition of expressive language [is] related to less aggression,” the authors declare, citing a study that found, in a demonstration of the obverse, that “expressive and receptive language deficits in kindergarten predicted later conduct problems.” Moreover, children who sustain longer periods of joint attention at eighteen months tend to possess stronger productive vocabularies at the age of two.

  “Consider all the ways in which storybooks conspire to help children maintain their attention,” the paper continues. “Children’s books often use bold colors and strong contrasts and typically depict objects and animals that appeal to young children. The page of the book provides a clear focus for attention, and unlike moveable toys such as balls and trucks, books are held and remain relatively stationary. An attentive adult can easily notice what a child is attending to and build on it with commentary. In turn, children are able to draw an adult’s attention to interesting pictures using a broad range of cues including gestures, sounds, and words. Thus, attention can be managed by the child as well as the adult.”

  When my daughter Phoebe said her first word, it happened in just the way that Dickinson’s paper describes. She and her brother and si
sters were piled in together as I read Peek-a-Boo! Studying the illustrations, Phoebe drew my attention with “gestures, sounds, and words.” To be precise, she pulled her fingers from her mouth, poked at a picture, and said: “Goh-goh.”

  For a second there was stunned silence. Then we all fell about. “Yes! That’s right, Pheebs! That’s a dog!”

  “Phoebe said her first word!”

  “Goh-goh!”

  We still use the word to this day.

  * * *

  THERE IS A downside to the phenomenon of joint attention, and of babies learning to look where we’re looking. If we are glued to our electronic devices, that’s what will draw their gaze, too. And what they see when they look at our faces while we are online may not be what we want them to see. In her psychology practice, Catherine Steiner-Adair met a young mother who, despite her best intentions, could not seem to refrain from getting out her tablet whenever her six-month-old son seemed to be occupied and content. “He’s just lying here and playing,” the young woman said,

  so I’m on the iPad and suddenly he stops playing and he is looking at me! I mean so many times—that happens 90% of the time—and I don’t know at what point he stopped playing and started looking at me. It breaks my heart because I don’t know how long he has been staring at me. I mean, what is he thinking? I feel so guilty that I’m not present with him and he knows it. It’s one thing if I’m unloading the dishwasher and talking to him. That doesn’t require brainpower, but e-mail does. It’s impossible to be really doing both. I know he knows I am completely disengaged, you can just see it in his eyes. So what does that mean to him [that] we are both in the same room together and I’m not being present with him?