Billion dollar baby

Marketing to toddlers has become big business and it has attracted plenty of criticism. Baby Robbie has just turned one. From the time he was a few weeks old, his mother, Maggi Tipton, was using Glenn Doman products such as laminated flash cards to hone his mathematics skills.

Now he's older, he regularly enjoys Baby Einstein DVDs and books - he has the boxed set - which expose his fast-developing neurons to Mozart, Bach and Van Gogh.

Tipton, of Bilgola, admits there's a certain amount of pressure on parents to "get it all in" before children start school, though she says her primary motivation for buying these products is their entertainment value. "I'd love him to find life easy," she says.

The niche market of newborns to three-year-olds is booming, with toys and educational materials developed for this sector now a $20 billion global industry.

In New York, mothers are buying outfits from Baby Prada and baby powder from Chanel. Educational videos such as Baby Einstein - launched in the US in the late 90s by a stay-at-home mother with $US18,000 of her savings before Disney bought the company five years later for $US25 million - have become an essential element of many toddlers' daily routines.

We now spend an average of $1000 a year on toys and nursery products for the up-to-three-year-olds, according to market research company GFK Oztoys. The Australian market topped $1 billion this year - a 10% growth in the past 10 months alone.

Young Media Australia has watched the "deliberate and aggressive" marketing to young children take off in this country in the past five years and believes it is inherently wrong because the youngsters don't have the cognitive ability to grasp it.

But with everyone else shelling out on the latest and best brands and with toddlers demanding an ever more expensive array of toys, what parent doesn't feel the pressure?

In her book Buy Buy Baby, US investigative journalist Susan Gregory Thomas exposes the lengths to which marketers are going to exploit the newborn-to-three market. By 18 months, she says, toddlers can discern brands and by the age of two they ask for products by name. Continued...