Despite the hyped-up marketing claims, parents who want to give their infants a boost in learning language probably should limit the amount of time they expose their children to DVDs and videos such as Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby, say researchers from the University of Washington and Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute. In fact, says the researchers' new study, rather than helping babies, the over-use of such productions actually may slow down infants eight to 16 months of age when it comes to acquiring vocabulary. They found that for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Baby DVDs and videos had no positive or negative effect on the vocabularies on toddlers 17 to 24 months of age. "The most important fact to come from this study is there is no clear evidence of a benefit coming from baby DVDs and videos and there is some suggestion of harm," said Frederick Zimmerman, lead author of the study. "The bottom line is the more a child watches baby DVDs and videos the bigger the effect. The amount of viewing does matter."
Published in the Journal of Pediatrics, the study examined a broad range of video viewing and found no positive or negative effects on infants of either age group from viewing educational and non-educational media or adult television programs.
"The results surprised us, but they make sense. There are only a fixed number of hours that young babies are awake and alert. If the 'alert time' is spent in front of DVDs and TV instead of with people speaking in 'parentese' - that melodic speech we use with little ones - the babies are not getting the same linguistic experience," said co-researcher Andrew Meltzoff.
"Parents and caretakers are the baby's first and best teachers. They instinctively adjust their speech, eye gaze and social signals to support language acquisition. Watching attention-getting DVDs and TV may not be an even swap for warm social human interaction at this very young age. Old kids may be different, but the youngest babies seem to learn language best from people," Meltzoff concluded.
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Source: University of Washington
