
"Baby Einstein" Makes Infants Dumber 5,663 Views - Click for Larger Image
The popular Baby Einstein series that was said to help babies get smarter, has proven to do the opposite. Everyone wants their little kid to be a genius, so it’s no surprise thousands of parents went crazy for the DVDs, books, CDs and toys.
An article in Time Magazine said that these products could be a huge mistake in the learning development of children.
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. 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.
Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, 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. 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."
(time)
References: time
1 Comment: on Products That Back-Fire
|