Motorized Baby Chair – Part II

Our ExchangeEveryDay, "Motorized Baby Chair" on January 24 drew a record 326 responses — most of them quite critical of the device.  Dr. Peter Vishton, inventor of the chair, asked Exchange for an opportunity to respond.  I have included a brief excerpt below, but I encourage you to read his entire letter.

"For many years, I have read and thought a lot about how children’s perception and reasoning change between 5 and 7 months of age — around the time that children start to crawl.  A lot of developmental science considers infant cognitive development to be mediated by their ongoing brain maturation.  An alternative is that cognitive development is limited mostly (perhaps largely) by a baby’s action abilities.

"From this latter perspective, if you give a child the ability to perform some action earlier than they otherwise could, then they may seem to improve in terms of related cognitive and perceptual abilities as well.  Maybe kids have the mental ability to do all sorts of things earlier than we think; perhaps they just don’t have any reason to do so until their behavioral repertoire can make use of those mental abilities.

"With this in mind, I developed a wheeled, motorized device to enable pre-crawling children to control their movement around a room.  Our studies involve having children visit our lab and 'drive' around for about 20 minutes.  Future studies might involve having children return a few times to get more experience with the device.  But, let me be clear here: no one envisions having a child drive around in one of these devices for hours per day, every day.  I agree with you that if this toy interferes with the typical development of independent crawling, then it’s time to stop using this device altogether.  We have no evidence that spending 20 minutes playing with this unusual toy delays the onset of crawling.  (Indeed, I suspect that it might have the opposite effect, by giving children a brief experience with what it will be like when they do crawl independently.  That might be useful for children who are slow to start crawling independently.)"

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