lapware

Literate Before Reading Call it lapware or totware, computer software is rushing to embrace younger children - and vice versa.

That meant creating a site that encouraged a preschooler to sit on a parent's lap and engage in collaborative mouse-clicking adventures - what Web producers began to call "lapware."

David Fratto, an executive producer who worked on Jumpstart Baby, which is to be published by a unit of the Cendant Corporation, emphasized that the product was intended as "lapware" - a program the parent and child should putter with together.

In the last five years, there has been an explosion in electronic media for babies and toddlers: "Teletubbies," the first television show for preverbal children; computer "lapware" for babies to play with while sitting in a parent's lap; and hundreds of videotapes and DVD's for even the tiniest infants.