Baby Einstein Doesn't Work

"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."

". . . the only thing that baby videos are doing is producing a generation of overstimulated kids."

Read the full article here.

I'm not the least bit surprised. Endangered Minds by Jane Healy (read my review of the book) says that children have a window of opportunity for learning language, and they can't learn language passively. They learn language from back-and-forth dialog - the kind that mothers do naturally with their kids. God knew what He was doing when he placed children in homes. Science is just catching up and discovering that that's where they learn best, at least at very young ages.