"Jetta is 11 months old, with big eyes, a few pearly teeth - and a tiny index finger that can already operate electronic entertainment devices.

'We own everything electronic that's educational - LeapFrog, Baby Einstein, everything,' said her mother, Naira Soibatian. 'She has an HP laptop, bigger than mine. I know one leading baby book says, very simply, it's a waste of  money. But there's only one thing better than having a baby, and that's having a smart baby. And at the end of the day, what can it hurt? She learns things, and she loves them."'

New media products for babies, toddlers and preschoolers began flooding the market in the late 1990's, starting with video series like "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby." But now, the young children's market has exploded into a host  of new and more elaborate electronics for pre-schoolers, including video game consoles like the V.Smile and handheld game systems like the Leapster, all marketed as educational.

Despite the commercial success, though, a report released yesterday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 'A Teacher in the Living Room? Educational Media for Babies, Toddlers and Pre-schoolers,' indicates there is little understanding  of how the new media affect young children - and almost no research to support the idea that they are educational. 

...In 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended no screen time at all for babies under 2, out of concern that the increasing use of media might displace human interaction and impede the crucially important brain growth  and development of a baby's first two years. But it is a recommendation that parents routinely ignore. According to Kaiser, babies 6 months to 3 years old spend, on average, an hour a day watching TV and 47 minutes a day on other  screen media, like videos, computers and video games. ...In a line of experiments on early learning included in a research review by Dan Anderson, a University of Massachusetts psychology professor, one group of 12- to  15-month-olds was given a live demonstration of how to use a puppet, while another group saw the demonstration on video. The children who saw the live demonstration could imitate the action - but the others had to see the video  six times before they could imitate it.

'As a society, we are in the middle of a vast uncontrolled experiment on our infants and toddlers growing up in homes saturated with electronic media,' Mr. Anderson said."

"This is all you need to know (and perhaps already do): Video games have grown into a huge business, outpacing the movie industry and bulldozing childhood as we knew it. We adults are not safe, either. Whether they admit it or  not, you probably have friends who can be found awake at 2 a.m. disemboweling orcs, foiling terrorist plots and scooping up fumbles and running them into end zones.

It is the opinion of Edward Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds, that such electronic experiences are not merely a hedge against boredom but a profound indicator of where the entire world is heading. Online, off-line; reality,  fantasy - these distinctions will cease to matter as more and more of us pass our time in virtual environments. Economies will evolve as we pay real money for virtual goods and vice versa. Conflicts that begin online will spill into the  real world and back. Laws will be written to protect our newfound interests."

The teens who spend a lot of time with peers doing nothing in particular are the teens most likely to demand the attention of the police. When the relationship between "unstructured socializing" and juvenile delinquency recently came  into scrutiny in a study published in Criminology, researchers gave public officials good reason to worry about teens who kill time by hanging out. But they also gave those officials reason to suspect that teens who congregate with  no constructive aim in view can only grow more numerous when family life disintegrates.

Conducted by scholars at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the new study of juvenile delinquency is based on data collected from 4358 eighth-grade students in ten cities. From those data, the  researchers adduce "strong evidence" that "unstructured socializing" fosters teen criminality. Regardless of whether they are looking at individual behavior or at social context, regardless of which statistical model they employ, the  researchers limn "a strong association between mean levels of unstructured socializing and delinquency" (p < 0.05 in all contexts and models).

And who are the teens who hang out with peers and get themselves into trouble?  The researchers' initial statistical analysis shows that "the amount of time spent in unstructured socializing with peers was higher among males, older  students and students who did not live with two parents."  Gender and age ceased to predict unstructured socializing in a second and more sophisticated statistical model.  But living with a solo parent predicted unstructured  socializing in both statistical models (p < 0.05 in both models). 

Apparently, it is the teens without fathers who are most likely to drift into aimless groups - and then to start looking for illicit excitement.