As I have long suspected, a new study has come out that the LA Times is reporting on. Now wait for it, the study says that babies who watch television turn out to have less of a vocabulary that ones who don’t. Mmmm, donuts. Of course the baby Einstein, DVD player in the car parenting set will not want to read about this. They forget that prisons put televisions in the common areas to keep the inmates, er, calm. In a television stupor more accurately. And so legions of babies fixate on dancing carrots and can’t express themselves with words. Or so the LA Times reports:
Parents hoping to raise baby Einsteins by using infant educational videos are actually creating baby Homer Simpsons, according to a new study released today.
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 six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found.
Parents aiming to put their babies on the fast track, even if they are still working on walking, each year buy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the videos.
Unfortunately it’s all money down the tubes, according to Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Christakis and his colleagues surveyed 1,000 parents in Washington and Minnesota and determined their babies’ vocabularies using a set of 90 common baby words, including mommy, nose and choo-choo.
The researchers found that 32% of the babies were shown the videos, and 17% of those were shown them for more than an hour a day, according to the study in the Journal of Pediatrics.
Of course someone got grant money to d this study, which could be filed under D’oh. If television reduces the intelligence of adults, how can anyone expect “baby television” to result any differently?
source: LA Times, ‘Baby Einstein’: a bright idea?, By Amber Dance, August 7, 2007
