A study suggests "Baby Einstein" and other baby educational videos are bad for kids. Researchers found for every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as "Brainy Baby" or "Baby Einstein," they knew 6 to 8 fewer words than other children.
The explanation? By spending time with "DVDs and TV instead of with people," the babies lose interaction with humans who "instinctively adjust their speech, eye gaze and social signals to support language acquisition." Also, Baby DVDs are worse than educational TV shows, because the DVDs "have little dialogue, short scenes, disconnected pictures and … linguistically indescribable images."
3 comments:
I guess that DVD's are just a higher tech "boob tube" Now we can rot our kid's brains and have HDTV babysitters. Quite the advancement from when my kids were young. Is reading to your kids just too old fashioned now?
This is very interesting, particularly as we are less than a week away from the projected birth date for our fourth grandchild. I haven't read the whole study, but I think the conclusion sounds right - babies need the interaction with people to really learn language, although I think playing music for them is a good thing.
What I do is to limit the DVDs to just 30 mins a day. And while its playing, I will interact with my son and do some 'additional talking'. Interesting study though...makes me think again...
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