(latimes.com) Parents hoping to raise baby Einsteins by using infant educational videos are actually creating baby Homer Simpsons, according to a new study released today.
For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as “Brainy Baby” or “Baby Einstein,” they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found.
Parents aiming to put their babies on the fast track, even if they are still working on walking, each year buy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the videos.
Unfortunately it’s all money down the tubes, according to Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Christakis and his colleagues surveyed 1,000 parents in Washington and Minnesota and determined their babies’ vocabularies using a set of 90 common baby words, including mommy, nose and choo-choo.
The researchers found that 32% of the babies were shown the videos, and 17% of those were shown them for more than an hour a day, according to the study in the Journal of Pediatrics. (more…)
Yep, my wife and I fell for this crap with our two children some years ago. I remember buying up various ‘baby’ videos that supposedly would help our kids learn “in a fun and exciting way!!” to no avail. It did not take long for Bob the Builder videos to find the new roles of coaster/frisbee in our house while Blues Clues videos just collected dust. I even tried the classical music thing thinking that somehow they would be inspired to find mistakes in Einstein’s theory of relativity at the age of two. Nope.
What our children needed was something that could not be found in the music aisle or on some video. They needed US. Only when we would take the time to read to them and talk to them without using ‘baby talk’ did we begin to see improvement with their vocabulary and comprehension skills. Also, we keep Playstation out of the house and gave them nature’s game system: OUTSIDE!!! Playstaion was brought in once we saw that they would prefer playing outside over siting hours playing video games.
All of this kinda makes you think. In the years before all of these educational tools such as children videos, educational television and the Internet, America produced more geniuses than what we have today. I wonder what was part of that secret?
Back to the article–
Christakis said children whose parents read to them or told them stories had larger vocabularies.
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