By Alice Park
The claim always seemed too good to be true: park your infant in front of a video and, in no time, he or she will be talking and getting smarter than the neighbor's kid. In the latest study on the effects of popular videos such as the "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby" series, researchers find that these products may be doing more harm than good. And they may actually delay language development in toddlers.
Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, 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."
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1650352,00.html#ixzz0piVjgn1t
Alice, this is nothing new. You are writing about a bogus "study" (really a badly performed phone survey in one city) that is five years old! It has been proven to be junk science and agenda driven. Please read the truth at: http://www.junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/20070823.html
ReplyDeleteMore recently, there was a REAL scientific study proformed by the University of Texas, which showed that BRAINY BABY videos taught children 22 times more, than than those that did not. This is the accurate and useful info parents need to know. The old study is just a fear agenda. Please tell other parents about the positive effects of DVDs and other positive studies that are available to people,