Mozart composed his first known piece of music when he was five. Shakuntala Devi’s father discovered his daughter’s knack for numbers when she was about three years old. Almost every parent secretly dreams of unlocking their child’s inner Mozart or Shakuntala Devi to help them succeed in today’s competitive education system where toppers are ubiquitous and entrance exams are the norm.
But how early is too early? What can parents do to maximise their baby’s full potential? Prodigy Framework believes it has the answers.
The website claims to enhance brain development in infants as young as three months old till the age of three. It garnered mainstream appeal when its founders appeared in the reality show for start-ups, Shark Tank India, where they were awarded a Rs 1 crore investment.
Founded by Mumbai-based couple Raghav and Shraddha Himatsingka in 2020, Prodigy Framework promises to awaken the genius of babies with five-minute-long daily activities and zero screen time. It gained traction during the Covid pandemic and subsequent lockdowns.
Reality versus dreams
Paediatricians, psychiatrists and child development experts that The Print reached out to said that all these language, physical movement and other milestones are attainable, but questioned the methodology, lack of scientific literature and the language used to attract customers. They also cautioned parents against falling for marketing gimmicks as this field of study is relatively new. America’s national public health agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says that by two months, an infant is capable of making sounds other than crying, track your movements, and look at a toy for several seconds. By age three, a toddler can talk “well enough for others to understand, most of the time” and draw a circle when shown how.
Prodigy Framework may be just another website in the wild west that is the Ed Tech space, but it stands out because its target group is parents of infants and toddlers. The concern is that such programmes prey on the fears and insecurities of parents, urging them to raise prodigies when all they should be worrying about is the next diaper change or vaccination date.
Himatsingka, however, insists that his programme doesn’t pressure or foster competitiveness among toddlers and their parents.
“A nine or 10-year-old can resist a parent’s wishes, and may be forced to participate. This isn’t true for babies. You cannot force a baby to do things it doesn’t want to do,” Himatsingka told ThePrint.
He added that there are no evaluations, tests or scorecards in the framework set for babies.
From transport to education
Himatsingka used to run a transport company in Mumbai, a business that skid to a halt in 2020 due to lockdowns that India implemented to tackle Covid-19.
Two years prior to the pandemic, the couple had a baby boy. As parents, they wanted to give their son the best and easiest life possible. “I didn’t want to see him struggle intellectually,” said Himatsingka, who is aware of the privilege he enjoyed during his school and college years. “I was fortunate enough to go to the best schools in India and the US. I went to DPS RK Puram here and then studied at Stanford,” he says. But Himatsingka found himself struggling.
“I wasn’t the smartest kid around. I had to always be on my toes and study really hard to get good grades. But there were people around me who did all of that easily, you know,” he says. Himatsingka doesn’t want his son to go through the same kind of struggles he experienced. “I don’t want him to feel that kind of pressure. I want his life to be easy and stress-free.”
Himatsingka started researching ways to ensure early brain development. He looked for activities that not only helped strengthen a father-son bond, but also ensured the physical and mental development of his child. “I could see tangible results,” he says.
For example, Prodigy Framework has an activity called ‘tummy time’ for infants, to increase their mobility and ensure they start crawling earlier than the average baby. “Tummy time is mobility on all fours. For this, we inform parents about the things they need to take care of, how to encourage tummy time and how to build up the baby’s stamina,” Himatsingka said. Among the benefits of crawling early is not only the fact that the baby is building strength and stamina in her muscles, says Himatsingka but also, “their brain wires itself in a lot of different ways, their vision gets converged, and also leads to more oxygen being pumped into their hearts.”
Within the couple’s circle of friends, word of their son’s cognitive development and skills started to spread. Friends began turning to him to help their infants “reach their full potential”. Requests started to pour in when nurseries and playschools closed their doors to physical classes due to Covid.
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Lockdown and anxious parents
During the lockdown, the couple started conducting online sessions, but demand was reaching unmanageable levels, claims Himatsingka. They had unwittingly tapped the best kind of marketing there was: word of mouth. Some of the activities that ProdigyFramework conducts are singing, art, physical exercises, and memory-boosting exercises. One of the memory-boosting exercises is through the use of Booster cards. Children are shown flashcards of an object with its name so that they start remembering it.
Anxious parents wanted their babies to crawl, talk and draw faster, and the Himatsingkas seemed to have the answer. On realising the potential of this relatively untapped market— most Ed Tech ventures cater to older age groups—the couple incorporated their company RaisingSuperstars in October 2020 — under which Prodigy Framework is a brand. Future expansion of other products will happen under the name RaisingSuperstars
Today, Prodigy Framework has associated with over 1 lakh parents worldwide, where parents have either taken their introductory WhatsApp classes or signed up for the full class.
Once the company was incorporated, the Himatsingkas fine-tuned the activities they were offering with the help of experts. They sought inputs from paediatricians to understand if the goals stated were achievable, and if the activities were safe for an infant.
“The curriculum was then vetted by experienced teachers and educationists. We also roped in professor a senior professor from Yale University to vet our programmes,” he adds.
The price range varies from Rs 500 to Rs 50,000. The Rs 500 programme is just an introduction to what the course offers, fully refundable if parents are unsatisfied with the claims. While the Rs 50,000 package comes with 17 kgs of course materials along with other activities that will last a year.
Course material includes books for kids, for parents, flashcards for memory boosting, as well as information on other activities from the course developed by Prodigy Framework.
On Quora, a lot of Indian parents complain that the programme seems like a ‘marketing gimmick’. However, most of these parents check out after taking the first WhatsApp introductory course that costs Rs 500. Parents on Quora who have taken advanced courses generally had a positive response.
Parents discussing the framework on Quora also didn’t discuss quantifiable results, but many said they didn’t expect their child to become a ‘genius’ after the programme. Vijay Simha, an Andhra Pradesh-based user, said that Prodigy Framework is not so much about raising ‘super kids’ as much as it is about becoming ‘super parents’ first.
“Fifty per cent (of child’s intellectual growth) is genetic contribution and 50 per cent is sheer parental contribution. So there is only a 50 per cent chance to begin with in the first place! The program gives me lots of ideas about how I can maximise my efforts to reach that 50% contribution in full,” Simha wrote.
Another parent who chose to remain anonymous wasn’t impressed. “There are thousands of parents who would not mind spending few thousands for their child even if they have a doubt that the programme might not be useful. Raghav is just playing with that emotion of parents,” the user wrote.
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What the experts are saying
Dr Pandu Chouhan, a paediatrician at Rajshree Medical College, Bareilly, said that all the claims on the website are “possible”. “Developing physical strength, music acumen at this age is very important,” he told ThePrint. “Anything one learns at this age forms implicit memories. They are unforgettable skills. However, what kind of technique we are using is also important,” he said.
Senior psychiatrist Dr Nimesh Desai in Delhi, too, agrees that neuro-enhancement at such a young age is possible but says Prodigy Framework’s website and promises seem inconsistent.
“Neurodevelopment enhancement is possible without a doubt. There are also a few people who are genetically smarter, and their identification can be enhanced so we don’t miss ‘geniuses’. But these varied facts are being capitalised through smart marketing. The website makes contradictory claims and the lack of consistency leaves a lot of room for doubt and is subject to scrutiny,” he said.
Expanding on this, he points out that the website offers no description of the scientific method in terms of biological brain sciences. “I have serious disputes on what they claim to be milestones and their improved milestones. There is an inherent fallacy in their techniques,” Dr Desai says.
Parents, for the most part, tend to try and explore early brain development, but there is a lot of hype surrounding this field. “It’s easy for parents to get lured by into marketing strategies,” Dr Desai thinks. “Early brain development sciences is an unorganised, unexplored territory and parents might be susceptible to a lot of applications or websites making unscientific claims. Some websites promising improvement in kids on the autistic spectrum are also floating on the internet with dangerous claims.”
He and others in the field underscored the need for quality standards and licences for such companies.