The Parenting Buzz : Baby Einstein – A No-Brainer…Literally!

Seems those Baby Einstein DVDs that have been all the rage these past few years may not help your child crack the theory of relativity. In fact, that supposed “genius fodder” may actually be hindering your child’s linguistic development.

According to a recent University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute study, DVDs of the Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby ilk don’t make infants smarter. The study found that for every hour an infant between the age of 8 and 16 months watched such “educational DVDs,” that child understood six to eight fewer words than an infant who didn’t watch them at all.

Hmm…guess that explains why Costco’s put them on sale…

Fredrick Zimmerman, lead author of the Study explains in an interview published in NEWSWEEK:

You can compare it with nutrition. A healthy child needs a balanced diet. A little sugar is not going to kill them but a lot of sugar creates all kinds of problems—tooth decay, obesity—so we call sugar empty calories. And I think it’s the same thing here. What some of these videos are is empty calories for the developing brain. So I would suspect that in small doses it’s not a problem, but in larger doses it becomes a problem—both because it displaces other things and because it’s potentially harmful in its own right. Again, that’s speculation.

So, what’s a parent to do to kick-start an infant’s intellectual development? According to Zimmerman, nothing beats good old-fashioned human interaction.

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