Baby Einstein Sucks the Vocabulary Out of Your Kid's Brain

We don't have a lot of parenting pet peeves. Little Miss Seattlest has already picked up our usual response to a lot of great debates: "Whatever."

But we've never cared for Baby Einstein videos. We're not one of those evangelistic no-television people -- we own a television, and we're not afraid to watch it. But we figure our daughter has several decades to interact with video screens, so why start early? The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television at all for kids younger than two. That includes the supposedly educational Baby Einstein crap.

We've always thought Baby Einstein was at best misguided. At worst we figure it's 21st-century snake oil, the product of greedy hucksters who don't really care if your kid gets smarter as long as they get rich selling you hypnotically shiny DVDs. As someone once said, Einstein didn't watch Baby Einstein, and he turned out OK.

So we were shocked, shocked, to hear about a study from UW researchers Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis demonstrating that not only isn't Baby Einstein a magic child-rearing machine, it's actually (here's the shocking part) not good for your kid's development:

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."

It's not the first blow to baby videos, and likely won't be the last. Mounting evidence suggests that passive screen sucking not only doesn't help children learn, but could also set back their development. Last spring, Christakis and his colleagues found that by three months, 40% of babies are regular viewers of DVDs, videos or television; by the time they are two years old, almost 90% are spending two to three hours each day in front of a screen. Three studies have shown that watching television, even if it includes educational programming such as Sesame Street, delays language development. "Babies require face-to-face interaction to learn," says Dr. Vic Strasburger, professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. "They don't get that interaction from watching TV or videos. In fact, the watching probably interferes with the crucial wiring being laid down in their brains during early development." Previous studies have shown, for example, that babies learn faster and better from a native speaker of a language when they are interacting with that speaker instead of watching the same speaker talk on a video screen. "Even watching a live person speak to you via television is not the same thing as having that person in front of you," says Christakis.

In a different article, Christakis says "I would rather babies watch 'American Idol' than these videos," because as the article says, "there is at least a chance their parents would watch with them — which does have developmental benefits."

We know, we know, parenting is a hassle sometimes. It's exhausting even when it's fun. But seriously, people, turn off the goddamn television so your kids don't turn out to be slackjawed.