The research is in on Baby Einstein videos: “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.”
Concrete enough for ya?  But if the enduring appeal of the discredited “Mozart Effect” is any guide, we’re still in for a long debate on this one. It takes parents a long time to become as disillusioned as they should be.Â
Here’s MojoMom explaining why Gen X parents love Baby Einstein (and why they shouldn’t). And here’s Chip debunking the Mozart Effect.
I think you’re jumping the gun a tad here. This is one study, for which all I’ve seen is an LA Times article. As MojoMom herself says:
There are two tiers of potential problems with Baby Einstein videos: do they live up to their marketing messages, and do they do actual harm? If they do harm, then there’s unsticking to do, but I’d like to see more than one study. If they merely fail to live up to their marketing hype, but parents are happy with the videos anyway, then I’m not sure there’s much cause for concern, at least not at the level of videos.
For example, saying that having a parent interact with the child is better than having the child watch a video may well be correct, but that’s less an issue of the videos and more an issue of other societal pressures (dual-income households, fears over unsafe child care centers, etc.) that cause parents to use videos as pacifiers.
Over 30 years ago when I was pregnant with my first child I was told that if I listened to Mozart and played it for my child after his birth he would have good math skills. I followed this advice since no harm could be done by it… Ironically enough my son Chris is a math whiz while my other 2 children (who did not get the Mozart treatment) are average. Like I said, what can it hurt?
The UW researchers did not specifically study Baby Einstein or Baby Mozart videos. They simply studied the general category of “baby videos/TV” as reported by parents. The UW media department though, was very clever in making a “stickier” press release by specifically citing Baby Einstein. It’s more memorable and also feeds into strains of anti-corporate-Disney as well as anti-obessive-parents-who-do-ridiculous-things-to-make-their-kids-geniuses. The press completely fell for the press release and usually characterized the study as having specifically debunked Baby Einstein rather than the category in general.
Interestingly, if you recall from The Tipping Point, many of these shows have been designed and edited for maximum stickiness.
Did you notice the line in the study: “Among toddlers (age 17 to 24 months), there were no significant associations between any type of media exposure and CDI scores.” Since our society does not pigeon-hole individuals based on their 16-month vocabulary score and noting that by the same study they will catch up to those who do not watch tv should we not first be asking if this is a bit of information the researchers released so they could feel like they accomplished something. Additionally should we not ask why mathmatics, comprehension, and thought process were not accounted for in this study? Finally (although there are a lot more problems with this study and interpretations), the research was gathered via telephone with the parents. That alone should be a red flag for a poor study.
So if this is “Concrete enough for ya’”, please contact me about this bridge I have for sale.
I have my own little baby einstein study that happened in my house. I have three boys ages 1-6. I stayed home with all of them, read the most to my first born…the only real difference in how my children were raised is that my first child watched a lot of baby einstein videos. We own the whole collection. At age two my eldest child knew all his numbers, shapes, colors and alphabet but he could not string his words together to form a sentence. He also could not imitate skills. We went through early intervention and found out that at age two are baby einstein loving child had the verbal ability of a six month old. after a year of intensive therapy and lots of tears on my side he caught up and now at six he is fine but has a little bit of a attention problem. My second son was not allowed to watch any baby einstein videos and spoke in complete sentences at 15ish months. My third child is 14 months and is way ahead of where my first born was at this age in terms of vocab spoken and imitation skills. I read the least to my youngest but he does have the benefit of two older brother, although my second child did not have an older brother that was talking and he talked very young. I call it the baby einstein video and truly believe from my experience that people should save their $20 and sing, read and talk to their children instead. TV is not good for the developing babies brain and I met many other mom’s who believed that the videos would help their children but actually hurt them instead. I call it the “baby einstein syndrome” and I am sorry that I fell for the marketing and hype.