Aug 19 2007
No words from Baby Einstein…
Well, not exactly no words. After research from the University of Washington was published in a Journal of Pediatrics article [1] on August 8, Bob Iger, the President and CEO of The Walt Disney Company which owns Baby Einstein had quite a few words to say.
He said, amongst other things, that UW’s press release was “deliberately misleading, irresponsible and derogatory”. [2]
And what did this “irresponsible” press release say? That baby DVDs, such as those from Baby Einstein, may actually hinder an infant’s development rather than help it. That for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants up to the age of sixteen months understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Rather than provoking me to anger, like Iger, my response to this news was identical to those of many bloggers and many parents around the world: “Well, Duh…”
It’s common sense (I feel confident in saying this as apparently only 49% of us think these DVDs will make our bundles of joy more intelligent) that a baby will learn more language from some good, old-fashioned human interaction than they will from watching screensavers with a little Mozart playing in the background. Indeed, on one of my more arrogant days while I was pregnant I could be heard in the baby department saying over-loudly that a child of a parent who buys Baby Einstein obviously has some genetic disadvantages when it comes to their IQ anyway.
But let’s be honest. Most of us know watching television is a mind-numbing exercise - that’s why we do it. And most of us know that the only benefit of an infant sitting in front of the box for fifteen minutes is that we get to have a quiet cup of coffee. If we spend the bulk of our time playing and talking and reading we won’t “bias the child toward visual-dominance at the expense of listening/language dominance in their later life”, as one leading pioneer in brain plasticity puts it, and no lasting harm will be done.
So why the furious demand for a retraction of a press release stating the obvious?
Baby Einstein specifically states that their products “are not designed to make babies smarter”[3] but their sales are pretty dependent on those 49% of people who, lacking common sense, think that they do. I know it, and they know it, and the US Federal Trade Commission might soon have something to say about it too, which is why more than a week later they are still baying at the moon.
So here is the crux of what I have to say to you, Bob Iger…
Do those six to eight words missing from our babies’ vocabularies happen to include “deliberately misleading”? Because those two seem pretty crucial when it comes understanding what Baby Einstein is all about.
