Baby Einstein: Better for Your Kid than Cigarettes!
The Columbia Journalism Review has our number. It's not actually true that Baby Einstein videos "suck the vocabulary out of your kid's brain." Wea culpa.
Baby Einstein has been playing dueling press releases with the UW for a few days. If they don't stop it soon, we're sending them to their rooms for a time out.
Throughout the squabble and on their website, Baby Einstein is careful not to make any specific claims about what their product will actually achieve. "All of our products are designed to encourage discovery and inspire new ways for parents and little ones to interact." They "provid[e] parents an opportunity to expose little ones to the world around them in playful and enriching ways." "The entire Baby Einstein collection is specifically designed to promote discovery and inspire new ways for parents and babies to interact."
If you don't want to buy Baby Einstein videos for your kid, that's cool. "Baby Einstein respects the decisions parents make for their children and believes its videos and other products are just one of many tools and activities parents can use throughout the day to interact and bond with their child."
Huh. That last argument sounds familiar. Baby Einstein videos can be part of your child's rich and stimulating childhood, just like Fruit Loops can be part of this nutritious breakfast.
Look, we're not one of those parents who screams "you're a bad parent!" because someone lets their kid watch TV for half an hour every once in a while because they need a break. Jesus, do we understand needing a break. But that kind of use -- hypnotizing your kid with video -- is how most parents we know use stuff like Baby Einstein.
It's also exactly the kind of use Baby Einstein itself is careful not to recommend. Why? Because they're already skittish about claiming any developmental benefits for their product even if you use it as they recommend, much less if you use it as an electronic babysitter.
Maybe Baby Einstein is perfectly harmless. But when that's their best-case argument, maybe you're better off trusting the American Academy of Pediatrics, who have a simple recommendation: no TV for kids 2 and under. (If only because then you won't have an 18-month-old begging you for Elmo crap.)
If you want to interact with your kid at music, poetry, or nature, why not skip the babified versions and break out some Mahler or Modest Mouse, Seuss or Silverstein, Discovery Park or the Cascades?
