BETTENDORF, Iowa — To the sound of 9-week-old Michael Galvin's wails and the strains of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," a dozen babies squirmed on their bellies, struggling to lift their heads off the carpet during "Tummy Time" class at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School.
Katie Galvin scooped Michael into her arms and cradled him on her lap. "I don't know if he'll develop on time," Galvin said as the other mothers stretched out on the floor in the school library and sang to their babies. "He doesn't like tummy time."
Tummy time is taking hold as the latest infant-stimulation craze as parents race to find ways to develop their babies' head control and teach them how to crawl. Parent-and-baby programs ranging from Bettendorf School District's free early learning program to a mother-and-baby yoga center in Manhattan are adding tummy activities to their curricula. Toy companies are bombarding parents with toys geared specifically to the sessions.
"We want to own tummy time," says Ira Hernowitz, senior vice president of marketing at Hasbro Inc.'s Playskool toy division, which launched the Tummy Time Picture Show earlier this year. Brisk sales of the toy — which features a plastic bubble containing images that light up when the baby presses a panel — encouraged Playskool to plan a second tummy-toy launch for January, Hernowitz says. He declined to give sales figures, citing competitive reasons.
The tummy-time craze is the fallout of a shift in child-rearing that began in the 1990s. That's when pediatricians began telling parents to put their babies to sleep on their backs to reduce the rate of sudden infant death syndrome.
Studies showed that the move cut the incidence of SIDS by as much as 50 percent — but back-sleeping babies were slower to gain head control and to crawl than previous generations of infants, who mainly slept on their stomachs.
Many pediatricians say tummy time isn't a make-or-break part of infant care, and children who don't participate typically catch up on all development skills by 18 months of age. Still, large numbers of parents don't want their babies to be the last on the block to crawl. They are earnestly turning their offspring bottoms up to instill new motor skills, even though many babies shriek in protest when placed in the unfamiliar position.
"A few years ago it was flash cards and early literacy," says Janet Chan, editorial director of AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Parenting Group, which publishes Parenting and BabyTalk magazines. Now, many parents get so worried about their back-sleeping babies' ability to crawl on schedule at about nine months that they approach tummy time for newborns "like a prescriptive, early sports-training regimen," Chan says.
Both Parenting magazine and its Web site, Parenting.com, regularly field questions from parents whose babies complain when placed on their stomachs, says Ms. Chan. "They feel they are failing or doing something wrong because baby doesn't like it."
Mattel Inc.'s Fisher-Price is working hard to capitalize on the anxiety. It added one toy last year, the Jungle Pal Music Mirror, and two more this year, the Kick & Push-Up Pinball and the Crawl-Along Musical Garden, that were developed "with tummy time in mind," says Kathleen Alfano, Fisher-Price's director of child research.
Tiny Love, a division of Tel Aviv-based Shilav Group, last year launched two new tummy toys and retooled its popular Gymini 3-D Activity Gym to add features for tummy play, such as a larger mirror. In February, yet another Tiny Love tummy-oriented toy, the Developlay Activity Center, is slated to hit store shelves in the U.S. United States.
"This is one of the great challenges now — helping babies with tummy time," says Yael Katz, a Tel Aviv psychologist who serves as a consultant to Tiny Love. "We started to hear it more and more — babies don't want to be on their tummies. You have to fight with them."
At Hasbro's Playskool, senior brand manager Sonia Talbot's own struggles with her son's tummy-time sessions caused her to push other company executives to back development of the Tummy Time Picture Show. Ms. Talbot says her son, Ryan, cried so much during tummy time that she called her doctor "a couple of times" to ask, "Do I really have to do this?"
Playskool colleagues wondered whether there would be enough demand for the toy, and Ms. Talbot told them that "this is something we have to do." The toy's strong sales have proved her right, she says.
First-time mother Ivy Stewart of Alexandria, Va., wanted to make sure her son, Callum, got enough tummy time, so she clocked his sessions. "He screamed bloody murder" the minute she put him down, she says. "I would literally watch the clock — 30 seconds, 45 seconds, 60 seconds." Proponents recommend a couple of sessions daily of a few minutes each.
Ms. Stewart considered quitting tummy time because she found it so stressful. She searched the Internet for like-minded mothers but found only more anxious parents, offering each other tips on how to entertain baby during tummy time and how to handle the crying. "There are entire discussion group threads out there about tummy time," she says. A friend's older sister also insisted that "you have to do tummy time."
Ms. Stewart did agree to give Callum a break at a family get-together last Christmas. During tummy time, "the noise level rose so that people would evacuate the room," recalls her mother, Mary McClure. Ms. McClure says she told her daughter to "give him a vacation. It's Christmas."
William Sears, the author of several popular parenting books, says tummy time isn't essential. Still, the San Clemente, Calif., pediatrician says he "puts in a plug" for tummy time in his coming revised edition of "The Baby Book" to assuage parents' anxieties that their infants might be slow to develop. Tummy time can also help prevent babies from developing bald spots and flattened heads, he says.
Some parents aren't easily reassured. "My mom says I could lift my head up at three months," says Ms. Galvin. She worries that Michael is a long way from achieving that milestone. In addition to taking her son to the "Tummy Time" class at Thomas Jefferson Elementary, Ms. Galvin practices with him at home, using a horseshoe-shaped cushion made by Boppy Co., a Golden, Colo., company known primarily for its breastfeeding pillows. The Boppy Tummy Play is designed to support a baby's chest during tummy time. Even so, Michael lasted less than five minutes in the position, she says.
Tummy toys are fine, says Dr. Sears, the child-rearing expert. But the best way to keep a baby amused during tummy time, he says, is for parents to get down on the carpet, too.
Stacey Hamel, a mother and day-care provider, figured that assuming the tummy-time position at a class in a Bangor, Maine, community center would help her understand why many babies find the activity so challenging. The instructor "had us get down on our stomachs and use the different muscles" to lift the head, Ms. Hamel says. "It's hard."