As Father's Day draws near, a new gadget emerges to make parents worry they're not doing enough for their kids: the LENA System. The idea behind the LENA is that researchers have shown that the more you talk to your kids between the ages of 0 and 3, the better their brains will develop. LENA takes the research one step further by trying to quantify how much talking is enough to ensure the best development and, furthermore, what words will help you get the best results. To do so, they give you two sets of clothes, a stuffed elephant and a voice recorder, along with some proprietary analysis software and a wall-charger. Put the voice recorder into the special compartment of your child's LENA clothes, record the results of the day's chattering, then plug it into your computer at night so the software can analyze how much closer (or further away) your child came to genius level that day. The cost of all of this stress-inducing wizardry? $800 - and probably a piece of your sanity, too. That said, I'm sure there's plenty of market share for this product: we do live in a world with competitive kindergartens that will mark your child as Ivy League-worthy from the age of five, so why not start paying out even earlier?

Via Geekdad