Baby Genius Edutainment Industry Worse Than Useless

Alissa Quart coined the phrase "baby genius edutainment industry" in her book, Hothouse Kids, and article in The Atlantic Monthly.   The claim is that  watching these videos/DVDs  "engage babies and provide parents with tools to help expose their little ones to the world around them in playful and enriching ways — stimulating a baby's natural curiosity."

Oops.  A new paper, part of a larger study, has found that making infants eight to 16 months of age watch such videos actually reduces language acquisition:

The scientists 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.

This is not a trivial problem.  A previous paper from the study found that

By 3 months of age, about 40% of children regularly watched television, DVDs, or videos. By 24 months, this proportion rose to 90%.

The answer is simple.   Turn off the TV.  Don't let kids under 24 months watch any electronic media, as the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends.
This is a bit trickier for families with infants and older siblings, who may not be adversely affected by a modest media diet.  At any rate Don't buy or use media (videos, DVDs)  "designed for babies" for a child under 24 months.

Below the fold, more details on the study and the papers from the study.

A quote from Alissa Quart's Atlantic Monthly article

The Baby Genius Edutainment Complex owes its explosive growth to more than just savvy marketing; it also has roots in actual scientific research. The popularity of DVDs with classical music, pinwheels, and colorful imagery was incited by infant-development theories that became fashionable in the early 1990s. As Liz Iftikhar, founder and president of Baby BumbleBee, puts it, the kid-vid biz emerged on the back of the “Mozart Effect.”

Details on the design of the Zimmerman Christakis Meltzoff study: the researchers:

conducted random telephone interviews with more than 1,000 families in Minnesota and Washington with a child born in the previous two years. Television, DVD and video viewing were divided into four categories: baby DVDs and videos; educational TV programs, DVDs and videos such as "Sesame Street, "Arthur" and "Blue's Clues"; children's non-educational television shows and movies such as "Sponge Bob Square Pants," "Bob the Builder" and "Toy Story," and adult television such as "The Simpsons," "Oprah," and sports programming.

More details on the study:

As part of the telephone interviews, which took about 45 minutes to complete, a standard inventory for measuring infant language development was used. Parents of the 8 to 16 month olds were asked how many of a list of about 90 words their child understood. Typical words on this list included choo choo, mommy and nose. Parents of the 17 to 24 month olds were asked how many words on a similar list they had heard their child use. Typical words from this list were truck, cookie and balloon.

Parents also were asked about how often they read books or told stories to their children. Daily reading and storytelling were associated with slight increases in language skills, not a surprising finding since both activities foster language development, Zimmerman said.

Meltzoff's view of the importance of the study, and the findings of the second paper:

"This study is important because it teaches us about the media diet of infants who are too young to speak for themselves. Most parents seek what's best for their child, and we discovered that many parents believe that they are providing educational and brain development opportunities by exposing their babies to 10 to 20 hours of viewing per week," said Meltzoff, a developmental psychologist who is the Job and Gertrud Tamaki endowed chair in psychology at the UW.

"We need more research on both the positive and negative effects of a steady diet of baby TV and DVD viewing. But parents should feel confident that high-quality social interaction with babies, including reading and talking with them, provides all the stimulation that the growing brain needs. It's not as though TV or a DVD provides an extra vitamin of some kind in the first two years of life, where we concentrated our research in this study. This area is one in which science, health and public policy all meet. We need to get our facts right so we can productively advise parents who so desperately want to do the right thing."

Papers arising out of the study:

Zimmerman FJ, Christakis DA, Meltzoff AN. Associations Between Media Viewing and Language Development Among Children Under 2 Years Old (forthcoming in Journal of Pediatrics)

Zimmerman FJ and Christakis DA. Associations between content types of early media exposure and subsequent attentional problems. (forthcoming in Pediatrics).

Christakis DA and  Zimmerman FJ. Associations between content types of early media exposure and subsequent antisocial behavior.  (forthcoming in Pediatrics)

Comments

[CrypticLife]

I nearly burst out laughing when I heard this on the news this morning. I'd never gotten these things because I wasn't convinced they did much, if anything. Hadn't considered that they might make things worse.

[Joel Sax]

I have to admit that I snickered when the news came out, too.

[Rae Pica]

I'm not sure what infant-development theories Alissa Quart is referring to. The websites for these companies state that their products are based on research, but they offer no evidence of the research itself.

Yes, there was some excitement a few years ago concerning the importance of an "enriched" environment in the first three years of life. But as leading brain researcher Dr. Marian Diamond has contended, most of the media's sound bites about the research were "unnecessarily discouraging." Parents were given the impression that if they didn't do all they could to promote their children's brain development before age 3, their children would be doomed to failure. Even the researchers behind the "Mozart effect," which Baby Bumblebee's president cites, have said that their conclusions were misinterpreted and misrepresented.

The belief that 10 to 20 hours of viewing per week is necessary for brain development is terrifying! What babies need are games like peekaboo and patty-cake, which have survived for generations because they offer infants so much, developmentally speaking. What babies need for optimal development are touch, communication with the important adults in their lives, sensory input, and movement!

I'm a children's physical activity specialist, and I didn't laugh when I read the news in the paper; I jumped for joy. Then I ran to my computer and blogged about it myself!