Vindication

Being a kid who grew up on a steady diet of PBS (oh Square One, how I loved you) and Nickelodeon (back when it was good), I've always been a little suspicious of the new wave of children's television: Baby Einstein videos. Turns out my suspicions might be justified, as this article came through on ScienceBlog the other day:

Despite marketing claims, parents who want to give their infants a boost in learning language probably should limit the amount of time they expose their children to DVDs and videos such as “Baby Einstein” and “Brainy Baby.” Rather than helping babies, the over-use of such productions actually may slow down infants eight to 16 months of age when it comes to acquiring vocabulary, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute.

It's an interesting little research project. They compared the vocabularies of groups of kids who were exposed to Baby Einstein videos, "normal" educational baby TV (like Sesame Street), "junk" baby TV (like SpongeBob), and adult TV (like Oprah). The babies who watched educational kid shows, non-educational kid shows, or adult shows were all about the same, but the babies who watched Baby Einstein videos knew six to eight fewer words for every hour per day they spent watching the videos. Here's why they think there's a difference:

“The results surprised us, but they make sense. There are only a fixed number of hours that young babies are awake and alert. If the ‘alert time’ is spent in front of DVDs and TV instead of with people speaking in ‘parentese’ – that melodic speech we use with little ones – the babies are not getting the same linguistic experience,” said Meltzoff, who is the Job and Gertrud Tamaki endowed chair in psychology at the UW.

“Parents and caretakers are the baby’s first and best teachers. They instinctively adjust their speech, eye gaze and social signals to support language acquisition. Watching attention-getting DVDs and TV may not be an even swap for warm social human interaction at this very young age. Old kids may be different, but the youngest babies seem to learn language best from people,” Meltzoff said.

Of course, when I was little, we did lots of reading and listening to music and all that other kid stuff too, which is probably a more important factor than what was on TV. I wonder how the TV-watching babies would compare in vocabulary to those who don't have a TV in the home?