By KATE BELGRAVE
It's 11.30 on a Thursday morning and the beautifully polished, rather upmarket wooden floor in the hall of the Ponsonby Community Centre is under siege.
It is being pounded by the tiny feet of what looks to be about ten thousand toddlers.
This is a session of Jumping Beans, the exponentially popular early childhood fit-for-learning programme that 3000 small persons in Auckland and Tauranga aged from six weeks to six years attend each year.
They come with a (parental) view to enhancing their physical, emotional and intellectual development.
To that excellent end, the hall is filled with brightly coloured squabs, mats, swings and plenty of exciting climbing gear for the diapered ones to learn to scale and fall from safely.
The frenetic energy is graced with the sound of Baby Mozart and Bach CDs. Classical tracks are so widely believed to stimulate intellectual and emotional development that some American states require schools to play them by law.
The punters seem very pleased with the results.
"You're starting them on things like listening to instruction," says the mother of an 11-month-old boy. "That's really important."
Her son has been a "bean" since he was 6 months old. She has the Baby Mozart CD at home. "Whenever I turn music on, he instantly starts waving his hands."
He's a pretty flash climber as well. He can roll and reverse at top speed and on very short notice. It is here his mother has noticed the real improvements - in climbing and safe moving. She also likes the social aspect of class. "I like to get him around other kids. He loves to watch people."
Beethoven's Fifth crashes into life above us.
Another mother - a droll, tongue-in-cheek type who is here with her second child, an 8-month-old daughter - thinks that Jumping Beans is great for "teaching kids the skills they need when they are mobile." She noticed the difference class made to her elder daughter mainly in safe-climbing technique.
"She always turned to go backwards down things. I'm sure she learned that [here]."
And the classical music?
"It's meant to be good for their brain development," she says, raising an eyebrow, adding that the "Mozart Effect" is very much part of parental folklore at present.
Which begs the question: are early-childhood fit-for-learning programmes genuinely useful or just the latest fad for parents desperate to raise an all-round achiever?
These are, after all, fascinating times in which to parent. They are certainly fascinating times in which to watch people parent.
Gen X is coming of age and may well be bringing its neuroses about getting ahead and 'I Am Not A Number' to the parenting gig.
Stories abound in New York of people signing 10-week-old babies up to music and gym class in the hope of acquiring the correct stimulation. Is that what we have in little old Auckland?
Jerome Hartigan says he is aware that such a mentality exists locally but that Jumping Beans does not promote it. He is the founder of Jumping Beans.
Hartigan, who has a masters degree in physical education and a background in athletics (he represented Ireland at the Olympics in the modern heptathlon), has long been "fascinated by individual potential."
As a young father he wondered if it was possible to help children to develop the same confidence as Olympic athletes "at a very, very young age."
He decided to create a programme that would integrate a child's physical, emotional and intellectual development and produce a well-rounded, confident individual. He and wife Sophie started the research in 1983 and launched the programme in 1988.
It's a little tricky to pin Hartigan down to specifics over his inspirations and modus operandi.
But his basic tenet for "Baby Beans" is that the most effective way for a brain to develop is through movement - thus an exercise programme that stimulates the mind. Hartigan was impressed by Suzuki music-training methods - "Here's a man who managed to train young children to do this incredibly difficult skill" - but thought children needed "a much broader reach of physical skills" that "enabled their whole brain and selves to develop."
To that end, he drew on "a whole range of different disciplines - from sports psychology, from classical physical education, from music, from the whole area of accelerated learning."
Hartigan eagerly points out that his programme is not about accelerating development or pressing children to perform skills before they are ready.
"It's much more important that children complete each stage of development adequately than that they actually race through development."
So ... What about the 6-week-olds who attend the class? Isn't that a bit young?
No, says Hartigan. "Babies need stimulus. They can start off with gentle tummy-time on a sloping surface. It's incredible how fast they move.
"The first thing is to educate the body with physical development and the emotions with music. [Some studies say] that the correlation between music [and learning] is very high."
Some studies say the complete opposite.
The most famous of these is the controversial 1999 book The Myth of the First Three Years, by American researcher John Bruer. The president of a St Louis neuroscience and cognition outfit, Bruer argued that neuroscience actually had very little fact-based knowledge about child development.
He poked a big hole in the classical-music-as-stimulus theory, too, arguing that the research that launched the Mozart Effect proved very little, other than that rumours travel fast.
He also suggested that the years zero to three were not as critical to a child's development as folklore claimed.
Bruer's take was that the nurturing most caring parents gave their kids at home was more than adequate for a child's development.
Local people - although reluctant to enter the maelstrom - seem to agree.
Michael Townsend, an associate professor at the Auckland University School of Education, and Claire Fletcher-Flinn, a senior lecturer in developmental psychology, both wonder whether fit-for-learning programmes teach children anything they would not learn in a normal, stimulating home.
Enthusiasm for the contrary, says Fletcher-Flinn, is perhaps more a comment on the popular culture than the facts.
But what the hell - at least the children are enjoying themselves.
Hartigan measures the success of his programme from parents.
He has not done any longitudinal studies, but says "the feedback we get from people is incredible."
Mothers are pleased to get out of the house, away from Teletubbies, to talk to other adults.
"I came with my first daughter because it was a way to meet people," says the mother of the 8-month-old girl. The reason she brings her second daughter to class? To get away from the first. "It gives you an hour to devote completely to the second child."
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