Trying to Jump-Start Toddlers +

By Ezra Bowen

Debra Clay, 34, a working librarian in Houston, felt every inch the caring parent. At the pricey Creme de la Creme preschool learning center, her eight- month-old daughter Kendall peered at two red dots on a white flash card held by a teacher, who called out, "Two!" As new cards came up, the teacher chanted the numbers while Kendall acknowledged the exercise with an occasional gurgle. Down the hall, Kendall's four-year-old sister Katie chirped, "Un, deux, trois . . ." mimicking the accent of her Parisian instructor. Elsewhere around Creme de la Creme, 150 other tots and toddlers grappled with art, music, French, math, gym, reading, science and social studies until mothers and fathers in Volvos and BMWs came to pick them up. "There's a lot of competition out there," said Debra, looking ahead to the school and college years. "It can't hurt to give them an early start in education."

Even at a low-key school like New York City's Morningside Montessori, for children 22 months and up, parents at an evening meeting reflected a measure of anxiety as they traded strategies for their offspring's imminent step into the best possible elementary schools. Some had applied to four or five. Gail Zimmerman, 41, who had visited twelve schools before deciding where to apply for her four-year-old daughter, advised, "Hang out at the school around dismissal time, so you can see who picks the kids up. Is it a chauffeur? A baby sitter? The child's mother?" And she suggested keeping a notebook in which to log such personal impressions. A few parents elsewhere in New York are hiring educational consultants to prepare youngsters for a 40-minute test, administered by the Educational Records Bureau, which many schools require for admission.

By contemporary standards, the Montessori parents are relatively easygoing. But thousands of other mothers and fathers are caught up in a phenomenon that educational psychologists call "hot-housing," trying to jump-start tiny students toward success. Since 1970, enrollment in early programs, both private and public, has surged from 4,104,000 to more than 6 million. Judging by the parental push, the trend will accelerate: at New York City's public Hunter College Elementary School, where two requisites for entry are a 135 IQ and a parental essay on the child, 1,500 applications pour in each year for 86 places in the pre-K and the kindergarten classes. The Sidwell Friends School in Washington (tuition: up to $5,000) sifts 300 applications for 28 pre-K spots so coveted that former Admissions Director Georgia Irvin received phone calls saying, "We're planning a family and we wondered, Is it really better (for admissions) to have a baby in November or April?"

A few educators, such as California School Superintendent Bill Honig and State Commissioners Gerald Tirozzi of Connecticut and Gordon Ambach of New York, applaud the preschool push as providing more children with better education sooner. Comments Roberta Babb, director of Creme de la Creme: "For a long time, people didn't realize all the things that a little mind is capable of. We give them a big head start for school." But others are dismayed by a parental mania to overstuff little minds that are not ready. At the recent convention in Atlanta of the National Association of Independent Schools, hothousing was a major topic among the 4,000 in attendance. Argued one of the panelists, Cleveland-based Educational Psychologist Jane Healy: "We're viewing children as a perfectible product into whom we can quickly and efficiently pour some learning."

Thus far the only proven beneficiaries of preschool programs have been culturally deprived youngsters whose work, at least in the early grades, has been helped by the federally funded Head Start program. But the sustained benefits of Head Start have been questioned. Moreover, says Yale Psychologist Edward Zigler, director of child development for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the Nixon Administration, early learning has "no long-term effect on middle-class kids." Zigler caustically condemns hothousing as a yuppie phenomenon, in which parents try to transfer their own hyperambitious goals to children. Irving Sigel, distinguished research scientist at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., asks, "What happens to kids' sense of self when they're valued only for achievement?" According to Marion Blum, of the Wellesley Child Study Center, hothousing may create "very nervous, anxious children afraid of failure and risk taking."

A few educators save their special scorn for such programs as Suzuki, a music-teaching method that sets two- and three-year-olds to performing on the violin and other instruments, or the Better Baby Institute in Philadelphia, which offers parents a weeklong course called How to Multiply Your Baby's Intelligence so that the toddler can achieve "encyclopedic knowledge." A & common upshot of such regimens, say critics, is robot virtuosity with little understanding and no lasting gain. The most reliable head start parents can provide, asserts T. Berry Brazelton, professor of pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School, in his 1985 book Working and Caring, is to back off from the pushy stuff, which he condemns as "a way for young parents to feel successful in their parenting." Says Ellen Kinberg, the Los Angeles regional director of Children's World, a day-care center with a relaxed atmosphere: "The best gift you can give your child is an extra year of childhood, because it cannot be bought."

With reporting by Lianne Hart/Houston and Sidney Urquhart/New York