How Not to Make a Baby Einstein
Jessie Jiang
Scienceline
February 212, 2008
In the best-selling Baby Einstein Language Nursery DVD,
images of colorful toys and bold patterns dance across
the screen over a soundtrack of stimulating music and
words spoken in seven languages. The video is part of a
growing industry aimed at parents who want their babies
to excel intellectually from the very start.
But those parents might actually be better off if their
kids didn’t watch any videos at all. According to a
recent study, the more baby videos a young child
watched, the slower his or her language developed.
Published in August 2007, the study triggered an ongoing
debate between its authors at the University of
Washington and The Walt Disney Company, owner of the
Baby Einstein brand. Other researchers, meanwhile, are
still arguing about how powerful and long-lasting the
effects of video-watching are on babies, though there is
general agreement that parents are better off
interacting with their children than planting them in
front of the television.
“Those [parents] who use DVDs as baby sitters are hardly
ever successful [in parenting],” said Dr. Victor
Strasburger, a professor of pediatrics at the University
of New Mexico.
The study, which appeared in The Journal of Pediatrics,
was based on telephone interviews of 1,008 parents and a
test known as the Communicative Development Inventory, a
standard measurement of language development in children
8 to 16 months old.
The parents were asked to report their children’s
typical amount of video exposure in each of six content
media types, such as children’s movies, television and
baby videos. To measure their babies’ language
abilities, the parents were also given a list of 80
simple words and asked how many their children could
speak.
For babies aged between 8 and 16 months, each hour per
day of viewing videos was associated with a test score
reduction equivalent to knowing about 10 fewer words on
the list of 80, according to Frederick Zimmerman, the
lead author and an associate professor of health
services at the University of Washington Child Health
Institute.
The study independently supported the American Academy
of Pediatrics’ recommendation of no television for
children under age 2. Strasburger, who was a consultant
to the academy, acknowledged that the group had little
hard evidence when publicizing its recommendation in
1999. As a result, he added, it was widely ignored.
“Now, thanks to the Zimmerman study, there is finally
some strong data that supports the recommendation,”
Strasburger said.
Disney was not alone in questioning the quality of the
study. Other researchers in the field argued that
interviewing parents on the phone would not produce
scientifically credible results. It would have been far
more convincing for scientists to actually observe the
babies, instead of relying merely on parents’ memories,
according to Deborah Linebarger, an expert on children’s
media at the University of Pennsylvania.
Linebarger, however, thought the academy’s
recommendation was too conservative. “There are better
ways to proceed,” she said. “Instead of telling parents
to avoid the media, wouldn’t it be great if we could
teach them to use it as a tool?”
In their own studies, Linebarger and her colleagues have
followed babies from 6 to 30 months of age, meeting with
them and their families every three months, to study the
effect of various types of children’s television
programs on early language development. They found that
certain educational programs, such as “Arthur and
Friends” and “Dora the Explorer,” seemed to spur
vocabulary expansion, while others, including “Sesame
Street,” had the opposite effect.
“The programs that showed positive influences generally
involved high levels of audience participation,” said
Linebarger. But that makes the findings for “Sesame
Street” puzzling because it is also highly interactive,
she said, adding that her research team is still looking
for an explanation.
Meanwhile, the University of Washington group is seeking
to improve its study by looking to see if infants who
watched videos will continue to have language deficits
throughout childhood. “We’ll also be looking at the risk
of attentional problems and the contribution of
television to obesity,” said Zimmerman.
As researchers wait for data from the next round of
studies, Baby Einstein’s Web site continues to portray
the DVDs as a fun way for parents and infants to
interact as they watch them together. In reality,
however, parents are more likely to be out of the room
and to use the videos as babysitters, according to the
University of Wisconsin’s Joanne Cantor, an expert on
the effects of mass media on children.
“At the end of the day,” Cantor said, “if you can hold
your baby on your lap and read her a story, why leave
her on a couch watching videos?”