Baby Einsteins

Monday, Aug. 06, 2007

Baby Einsteins: Not So Smart After All

By Alice Park

The claim always seemed too good to be true: park your infant in front of a video and, in no time, he or she will be talking and getting smarter than the neighbor's kid. The Captain experimented with this concept, but with his usual flair for the overdramatic and petty preoccupation with self-interest. Einstein was smart and famous and all that, but he weren’t as rich as Hilton Paris, or whatever that skinny white bimbo is called. So my offspring, as soon as they could be propped up by cases of 16 oz. PBRs, were made to watch Get Rich Quick videos in the hopes that they would make their first million before they had the legal right to spend any of it. By the time they could legally hire an attorney to try and recoup their earnings, I’d have squandered it on insignificant trinkets, cheap booze, and cheese whiz. If not theirs, then genius on my part at least. In the latest study on the effects of popular videos such as the "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby" series, researchers find that these products may be doing more harm than good. And they may actually delay language development in toddlers. Not so The Captain’s kids. By the age of two, they all were multi-lingual, with an impressive vocabulary of multi-syllabic foreign words rolling off their little toddler lips – words like: Budweiser, Heineken, Dos Equis, Pabst and (brace yourself) Haffenreffer.

Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis (never hard of that foreign beer), both at the University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. (The Captain had the boob tube set to ESPN2, where foreign beer commercials are abundant.) These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. "The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew," says Christakis. "These babies scored about 10% lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos." (For the record, Einstein was a C student, making some lame excuse about being bored and gifted. The Captain was a “strong” C student, but that BS about being gifted never cut it with my detention monitors.)

It's not the first blow to baby videos, and likely won't be the last. (Remember Barney? that horrific purple hobgoblin of a dinosaur on public television? The Captain does – having found himself at the tender young age of seven at a neighborhood birthday party fighting off unwanted advances and shouting “Get off me you F#@#*%@ purple pervert! …But I digress.) Mounting evidence suggests that passive screen sucking (Even The Captain hasn’t heard of that!) not only doesn't help children learn, but could also set back their development. Last spring, Christakis and his colleagues found that by three months, 40% of babies are regular viewers of DVDs, videos or television; by the time they are two years old, almost 90% are spending two to three hours each day in front of a screen. (Yeah, but can it crawl to the fridge, open a beer – can or bottle – and deliver it to Dad with nary a drop spilled? And change its own diaper? Huh?) Three studies have shown that watching television, even if it includes educational programming such as Sesame Street, delays language development (The Captain’s own anecdotal studies have shown that kids who watch Big Bird on Sesame Street are wusses). "Babies require face-to-face interaction to learn," says Dr. Vic Strasburger, professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. "They don't get that interaction from watching TV or videos. In fact, the watching probably interferes with the crucial wiring being laid down in their brains during early development." (Do NOT try to rewire your child’s brain. There are no wires anywhere to be found in there.) Previous studies have shown, for example, that babies learn faster and better from a native speaker of a language when they are interacting with that speaker instead of watching the same speaker talk on a video screen. (Except most people don’t allow natives in their homes.) "Even watching a live person speak to you via television is not the same thing as having that person in front of you," says Christakis (Duh, the person in the TV screen can’t throw a real punch.)

This growing evidence led the Academy to issue its recommendation in 1999 that no child under two years old watch any television (Does cable count?). The authors of the new study might suggest reading instead: children who got daily reading or storytelling time with their parents showed a slight increase in language skills. (The Captain for one loves regaling his children with ribald tales of his youthful debauchery – no sheltering these cherubs! You should see the glazed looks in their eyes.)

Though the popular baby videos and DVDs in the Washington study were designed to stimulate infants' brains (The Captain is writing a book about brain stimulants which the censors are editing as we speak – but remember, NO WIRES!), not necessarily to promote language development, parents generally assume that the products' promises to make their babies smarter include improvement of speaking skills. (Basic Rule of Life: dumb parents, dumb babies.) But, says Christakis, "the majority of the videos don't try to promote language; they have rapid scene changes and quick edits, and no appearance of the 'parent-ese' type of speaking that parents use when talking to their babies." (To be fair, the studies neglected to mention that these babies achieved a mastery of X Box at an unusually young age.)

As far as Christakis and his colleagues can determine, the only thing that baby videos are doing is producing a generation of overstimulated kids. "There is an assumption that stimulation is good, so more is better," he says. "But that's not true; there is such a thing as overstimulation." (There’s a tried and true remedy for that – give ‘em the Irish teething medicine, better known as Jameson’s, and they’ll sleep like, well, a baby.) His group has found that the more television children watch, the shorter their attention spans later in life. "Their minds come to expect a high level of stimulation, and view that as normal," says Christakis, "and by comparison, reality is boring." (You, my loyal Myrmidon, know that reality is anything but boring!)

He and other experts worry that the proliferation of these products will continue to displace the one thing that babies need in the first months of life — face time with human beings. (Not unlike the corporate environment, except that faces are regularly pressed against asses in this setting) "Every interaction with your child is meaningful," says Christakis. "Time is precious in those early years, and the newborn is watching you, and learning from everything you do." So just talk to them; they're listening. (Ahoy, little Cap’n, muchos Dos Equis – Pronto!)

Believe The Captain when he says: Stay Away from the Big Yellow Bird!

Yours with an Einstein-like GPA,

The Captain