There's an advertising saying that goes something like "put a baby or a dog in a commercial and you can sell anything." But as seemingly universal as the image of the child is, the specific way it's portrayed by commercials seems a real index of the particular concerns of the times.
Check out these two TV spots. One is from Gerber; the other, the latest in E*Trade's now classic "talking babies" campaign:
Though the Gerber spot offers a touch of reverent wonder about childhood, while the E*Trade derives its humor precisely from its irreverence, in both, the babies are wise -- or wise guys -- beyond their years.
One child savant works out a complex formula; the other is hip not only to the complexity of trading, but the coolness of the latest mobile devices. As such, both commercials echo the Romantic idea that babies know lots more than we assume they do. As Wordsworth famously put it, "The Child is father of the Man."
But the Wordsworthian echo here is a pretty distant one. The kind of knowledge the Romantic Child was believed to possess and what these babies are wise to is very different. Here's the poem ("The Rainbow" [1807]) where Wordsworth's maxim first appeared:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
As I understand it, to Wordsworth, the child -- who has not yet been corrupted by language and social convention -- is seen as a repository of a "naturally pious" heavenly vision. As a figure, the Romantic Child has access to an immaculate perception of nature and the divine.
That's why children for the Romantics, as M.H. Abrams noted, are poetic role models. As Coleridge put it, "To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar ... this is the character and privilege of genius..." (pp. 378-9)
Wordsworth's use of the word "piety" is no accident. His picture of the child can be traced back to a t least the New Testament, as in "unless you become like children you cannot enter the kingdom." And it's a meaning that has not yet disappeared from culture. Just think if Keith Haring's icon of "The Radiant Baby."
Of course, such images are idealized. Children scarred by war, natural catastrophe or poverty certainly must see things differently. As Trotsky once put it, "life strikes the weak, and no one is weaker than a child."
The Competitive Baby Genius
It's not like the babies in these TV spots are threatened by such realism. But, idealized as they are, they nevertheless offer a fascinating inversion of Romantic assumptions. Where the Romantics saw children as role models, these kids, instead, emulate us grown-ups. Instead of us miming them, they're imitating us.
What both spots bring to mind for me is the whole array of educational and developmental products that urge parents to "start young" to "give your kids the edge." A website I came across recently illustrates this attitude:
"Baby genius university. Nobody has championed the baby genius concept more thoroughly than Glenn Doman of the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential. Through his best-selling books, 'How To Teach Your Baby To Read' and 'How To Teach Your Baby Math', he introduced the world to the concept of the baby genius. His Baby University teaches parents how to coach their kid geniuses to advanced levels of intelligence, understanding and ability ... Early learning creates a rich neural network that will always provide greater potential for genius-like thinking..."
Reading these spots as indicators of cultural values suggests that just as our rationalized, practical society has little time for poems -- by Wordsworth or anyone else -- so the idea of playfulness or wonder for its own sake (embodied in the Romantic Child) is an endangered intellectual meme as well. It's almost as if, in these commercials at least, childhood no longer exists.
In this respect, you might say the old Romantic/Christian image of the child is being replaced by an even older, but pagan one.
For like the goddess Athena, these kids seem to have been born all grown up.
