Another study has fueled the ongoing debate between the warring factions of parents over the value of so-called enrichment videos on promoting language skills and fostering infant development.
On one side of the divide there are the parents who subscribe to the pseudo-educational merits of make-your-own-wunderkind video series such as Baby Einstein, Baby Galileo, and Baby Pick The Name of A Really Smart Person In History And Put Their Name after the Word Baby. And on the other side are the parents who believe in real world parent-child interaction and creative playing and who think the DVDs make better drink coasters than learning tools.
The camp without water rings on their coffee tables just received reinforcements through a highly publicized study by veteran child development researchers at the University of Washington. Over 1,000 families were surveyed in February 2006 and found that infants between 8 and 16 months who regularly watched Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby videos knew substantially fewer words – six to eight out of 90 – than infants who did not watch them. Furthermore with some of the babies in the study watching up to four hours of the propaganda enrichment videos a day, made possible by the automatic replay feature on the DVDs and the complimentary Clockwork Orange eye-holder-opener devices, the deficit was found to increase with each additional hour of viewing
Let me see if I understand you correctly O Wise Researchers. Plopping my children down in front of a television for hours on end for them to stare with glassy-eyed open mouthed wonder at a “rapid-fire melange of images, sounds and words in multiple languages that seem to have little connection to one another” may be stunting their intellectual development? Cough…irony.
Not surprisingly, Disney-Owned Baby Einstein takes offense at the findings and insists they have never claimed the DVD’s, purposed to instill a love of classical music, the arts and nature, to be educational. Yet their marketing language states that some videos promote language skills and foster infant development while others provide “a jump start on learning.” The latter I understand are packaged with jumper-cables and instructions as to where parents should attach the alligator clips to their children for the best results.
If used in moderation for 15 minutes as a down-time activity or just to let mom or dad throw in that extra load of laundry, I think Baby ______ can be a harmless distraction during the day, but too many hypercompetitive parents want these baby videos to be a foolproof method to give their kids a head start and to guarantee their future academic success; and the seductive videos prey on these vulnerabilities and fears.
I say let’s develop baby videos that will really benefit our children and give them the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century. Baby Buffet? Baby Bloomberg? Baby Gates? Or maybe Baby MLM? You know, have them start contributing right away. Hey, if children can stack recalled Baby Einstein Blocks they can certainly manage a simple pyramid scheme.
