Lessons in the womb

Would-be mothers are going to extraordinary lengths to give their child a head start in life.

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 foetus to recognise patterns and differentiate sounds. After baby Alexander was born, Ling was certain that he was especially engaged, aware and smart. She's 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 one-and-a-half years old.

"At four months, his paediatrician said: 'I can tell you right away he's not autistic,'" Ling recalls. "Those were her exact words, because his focus was remarkable for his age."

BabyPlus is one of a small number of "prenatal learning systems" being marketed to expectant parents these days. With names such as Lullabelly, Bellysonic and FirstSounds, they offer everything from soothing tones to foreign languages as they promise anxious parents a better, calmer baby.

Yet even as some parents pay more than $100 (Dh367) for these devices, experts say there is no proof, no scientific studies, to support the claims.

"It probably won't do any good and could be harmful," says Janet DiPietro, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University who has studied foetal development for 20 years.

But 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 FDA-regulated in any way", she adds.

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 foetuses, starting at 30 weeks, can acclimatise to sounds over time and that they develop memory at 34 weeks. Does that suggest the learning proposed by BabyPlus and other devices can occur?

Dutch obstetrician-gynaecologist Jan Nijhuis, who conducted the study, hesitates to make a correlation. "It is questionable why one would interfere with the natural environment of the foetus, who is busy enough," he said.

People agree on this much: Starting at 18 weeks, foetuses 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.

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 could be dangerous. The devices could damage a baby's hearing ability and disrupt its sleep, DiPietro says. "Foetuses are almost always asleep. 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 what you're doing with these devices."

Lisa Jarrett, whose company sells BabyPlus, says the device is set to a safe, un-adjustable volume 40 decibels quieter than the mother's heartbeat. Jarrett's own experience as a mother of seven and anecdotal evidence from other mothers have convinced her that prenatal learning occurs. Jarrett heard about the idea in the early 1990s when her husband, a reproductive endocrinologist, showed her an 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. You could hear everything outside - speaking, television and honking horns but it was muffled, like listening underwater," he said.

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.

"They're much more ready for nursery rhymes than they would be," Logan says.

Jarrett, who once worked at an in vitro fertilisation laboratory, sent for the cassette tapes when she was pregnant with her first child and used them with subsequent ones. They were all calm babies and hit their paediatric milestones early, she says.

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 non-profit arm and set to start in November, will look at prenatal auditory stimuli. She expects it to support the theories behind her device. "So-to-speak 'experts' don't have any clinical trials to defend that a prenatal curriculum might not be beneficial," Jarrett says.

"We're seeking out further validation. We know that we're a new niche and it's going to take time," she adds.

Developers of the strap-on Ritmo audio belt have the same conviction. The system was spawned in part by interest in the "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 mums to play music to their growing foetus. Retailing for $149 (Dh547), the elastic belt has a palm-size "controller hub" that plugs into four built-in speakers and an iPod or other MP3 player (not included). Mum can listen along through headphones.

According to Mercy D'silva, chief sales officer for the company producing Ritmo, the device allows parents to acclimate their babies in utero to any sounds - foreign languages, classical music - chosen by the parents. The company cites University of Wisconsin studies and articles about foetal habituation as evidence.

Joan Loveland, an obstetrician-gynaecologist with offices in the District, 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 says.

"We don't have any evidence that it's harmful or helpful. If you want to spend that kind of money."

An advertisement in a parenting magazine persuaded Paula Cross and her husband, of Kensington, Maryland, to try prenatal learning. She used the BabyPlus when she was pregnant with daughter Chelsie, now 15 months old.

The couple called it the "baby boom boom" because of its pulsing noise, which accompanied Cross on her morning commute to work and even lulled her to sleep at night during pregnancy.

"There's such a focus on kids achieving at a young age," Cross says. "I teach middle school in Montgomery County and they focus from kindergarten on up how to get into college. I'll take any step to get ahead of the game to help her succeed."

Did the device work? "The proof is in the pudding," says Cross, who believes her daughter is smart. She plans to use BabyPlus to friends often and plans to use it during any future pregnancies.

Jessica Boger, a lawyer in Washington, came to a different conclusion after researching prenatal learning, deciding that the science didn't hold up.

"We all want our children to be smart and successful and to get a head start but I think a lot of companies feed off our insecurities about that," she says.

As Loveland puts it, "Do we really need our foetuses to be in a classroom or is it enough for them just to be foetuses? Can't we just appreciate that what nature is doing is so brilliant and so enormous that it's more than enough? This stress will rob people of the joy of being pregnant. And that's a shame."