When her child's first word was Dora, Susan Gregory Thomas realised that marketing to children had gone too far, so she delved a little deeper, writes Catherine Cleary.
Susan Gregory Thomas's daughter's voice answers the phone when it goes to the machine. "Leave a message under the tone," she says before dissolving into giggles. The six year-old girl is a typical first child, her mother says, eager to please. Round their house, that urge translates into insisting vehemently, "I hate Disney." "Cut to the shrink's chair in 20 years and I can hear her saying, 'My mom just took the fun out of everything,'" Gregory Thomas laughs.
The anti-Disney sentiment is the equivalent of Eric Schlosser's child saying he hates McDonalds. Because what Schlosser did for the Big Mac with Fast Food Nation, Gregory Thomas is hoping to do for Big Bird (and Elmo and Dora) in Buy Buy Baby, her alarming new book about the targeting of babies by marketing, publishing and television executives.
Gregory Thomas was a Manhattan-based business and technology journalist in 1997 when she began to get the feeling that the suited professionals were taking a big interest in the spotless minds of the newest people on the planet.
Software and hardware manufacturers started to approach her with "smart" toys being developed for babies. At the same time television began to be created for the pre-language generation.
And just as "lapware" was being developed for babies, Hillary Clinton held a White House conference on the importance of nurturing in early childhood. The conference was a high-minded plea for state funding for early childhood education. It was backed by Hollywood's Rob Reiner, who came up with the emotive soundbite that "justice begins in the high chair, not the electric chair."
But a raft of consumer products such as Baby Einstein and the Mozart Effect was released like a virus targeting Generation X parents who wanted to do the best for their children in a time-pressed world.
Safely under the fig leaf of "education" the new books and television programmes went straight to the heart of the busy parent who felt they had to plop the baby in front of the screen. Babies were not being left alone. They were being educated, these products and programmes promised. Now, Gregory Thomas writes, a quarter of all children under two in the US have a television in their bedroom.
There is something Orwellian and nightmarish about the scenario the Manhattan mother of two paints in her book, which is written in straightforward reporting style. Rattling round in the spotless minds of small children who live in a pre-language world are the "spokescharacters" who will later loom up on the supermarket shelves within reach of their small hands.
Her second daughter Frankie uttered "Dora" as one of her first words, even though she had never seen the cartoon. Last Halloween the rebellious three-year-old insisted to her mother that she wanted to dress up as Barbie.
"Nobody had put all the pieces together and I was really surprised that I didn't find more obvious villains," Gregory Thomas says. "Kids' marketers had a vague idea that it might work and they were just generally thinking about the next big hit and not the long-term effect.
"A licensed product is only going to take off if everything becomes covered in Shrek or whatever but there was no research about how infants and toddlers process media. People say about the programmes aimed at the nought-to-threes, 'oh but she loves it,' but if we gave her whiskey would she love that too?"
In the book she outlines some of the research available about how children watch television. "PET scans of five- and six-year-olds watching television show 17 different areas being stimulated. In babies, the same scans show that there aren't even the synaptic connections between those areas."
The most frightening line in the book is the suggestion that rather than being contented, the baby gazing wide-eyed at the screen could be being "riveted into a low-level seizure state".
"Babies are not getting any of the underlying narrative or the positive social message. They're only getting character recognition, and the characters are selling them something. So Elmo or LaLa are the Nike swoosh. These are lifestyle brands, not teachers." These programmes need to come with health warnings, she argues, that they are not suitable for infants.
Gregory Thomas insists her book is a work of journalism, reporting the facts rather than offering advice to parents. "I hate preachy. I think it's obnoxious." But there is clear advice to those who are looking for it. "There is no reason to show anybody under the age of two or even three television," she says. "But that's such a personal decision, and one thing the research has shown is that you should always ask questions about what you are seeing and try to get your child to decode what they're seeing."
Part of that is about the parent reasserting themselves as the authority over the voices on the screen. "One of the things that the marketers do really early is create that wedge and try to establish themselves as the expert."
And what about cash-rich time-poor Ireland, where television for the under twos is an increasing part of their day? "In any society like that all domestic and intimate culture is outsourced. You can pay people to plan your children's birthday parties." The real luxury is having the time to "do nothing at all with your children," she says. "That requires a personal response and a political response. What is really educational for babies is just to hang out with their parents. And this can't happen in a society in which there is no parental leave, no universal healthcare for families and no state-supported childcare."
So how did she research and write a book as a working mother without reaching for the remote when things got busy? "I have a really intense set-up. My husband works from home and I use a writer's space or else we'd be divorced. It was relay race kind of stuff. I'd be nursing the baby and then hand her over to him to work for a few hours. In a capitalist consumer economy we really want to believe that things can be easy and if we can just figure out the right way they can be easy. But they're not."
And her next book? "I'm really interested in looking at childcare but my agent told me it would be too depressing, so I'm looking more deeply at the Generation X-ers. They were the people who really changed marketing history."
Buy Buy Baby: by Susan Gregory Thomas is published by HarperCollins, £12.99 in UK