Last night my 9-year-old daughter, Eliza, was so excited to see a discounted Baby Einstein DVD at the Barnes and Noble checkout line. She had no desire to buy the little-kid flick but was happy to see her current event come to life. She figured--and probably rightly so--that the book store was trying to dump their versions of once-touted educational DVDs because of all the bad press lately. She had a point.
For her week as class reporter she chose the news story about the Walt Disney Company offering refunds to anyone who bought a Baby Einstein video or DVD since 2004 and could send it in with the original case and date of purchase. The gesture was a response to years of bombardment by Susan Linn's Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. Good luck with that Susan.
The Einstein brouhaha began in May, 2006 when Linn filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against the Baby Einstein Company and the Brainy Baby Company claiming false advertising because their labels said the products were "educational." She said few parents knew that the American Academy of Pediatrics issued guidelines discouraging TV for children younger than 2. (On their behalf, Baby Einstein's General Manager, Susan McLain, said the company never said claimed their products would make babies smarter and referred to Linn's antics, as "a stunt." )
In the summer of 2007, University of Washington investigators published a study in the Journal of Pediatrics proving what kids have known all along. Videos and DVDs are not educational for the very young. TV is fun. It's relaxing, sometimes entertaining and while it may throw out a few fun facts devoured by attentive 4-year-olds, it's not going to stir the intellectual thought processes of a zero-year-old.
Worse, the study hinted that TV could make kids learn to speak more slowly than non-TV watchers. Investigators interviewed 1,008 parents of children ages 2 to 24 months and found that for every hour of TV watched, scores on a standardized communication-development test dropped by about 17 points. The University of Washington press release said that meant babies would understand six to eight fewer words for every hour-a-day watched. That statement irked the Baby Einstein folks who tried to have the school retract the release. The university stood by their science.
The study elicited responses from child-development experts who said things such as, "the real world is better for kids than the virtual world." Or, parents should interact with their kids rather than plunk them in front of the TV. In a scholarly journal, Heather Kirkorian at the University of Massachusetts and Ellen Wartella at the University of California, Riverside, said the "studies on infants and toddler suggest that these young children may better understand and learn from real-life experiences than they do from video."
Was anyone really stunned? These conclusions echoed what moms have known since the days of Wonderama and Howdy Doody. TV is a cheap babysitter. If you want your kids to talk, you should try talking with them.
The huge shocker isn't that Baby Einstein isn't going to turn your kid into an Einstein, but it took a scientific study and one persistently angry mom to convince parents that they should play with their children.
P.S. Julie Aigner-Clark, who founded the Baby Einstein Company in 1997 before it was sold to Disney in 2001 was honored as a notable U.S. citizen by former President George W. Bush and got to sit in the gallery during his State of the Union. So much for Bush's thoughts on language acquisition.
