you won't believe this

[Margaret Fleck]

This may simply be a symptom of the fact that there are a lot of insecure
high-income
parents out there.   You can buy a huge range of expensive baby toys that
pretend to
teach numbers, colors, letters to tiny infants.   And you can buy educational
videos and
electronic toys.   Most of this stuff seems not to be all that much fun to play
with---no
real competition for rattles, blocks, sticks, electrical wires, and the like.  
But apparently
enough parents feel they have to buy it otherwise their kids won't grow up
intelligent.

Lena isn't all that all *that* expensive in the context of high-end baby gear. 
 I personally
survived three kids using only $15 umbrella strollers, but it's quite easy to
spent $300-400
on a stroller.    There are $900 strollers on the market.      Its pricetag is
fairly comparable to
a new electronics toy like a video ipod or a wii.  

I doubt we have to worry about Lena-using kids not seeing professionals for
problems like
language delay.   The high-income kids with nervous parents will *also* be
taken to see 
professionals if they aren't talking at the right time.   (And they all own
books with charts of
what little kids are supposed to do at which dates.)  The low-income parents
aren't going to be 
shelling out money for this kind of toy.

As a side note, it's an amusing choice of name.   Anyone with connections to
image processing with
immediately remember that Lena is the name of a porn star whose face was
cropped out of a
Playboy article and used as a standard test image.

Margaret Fleck (U. Illinois)




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