You don't need to be an adult Einstein to know that the very concept behind videos like "Baby Einstein" is suspect, at best. My wife and I never even considered the stuff. Now, with our oldest at twelve years, our children seem to be as advanced, if not more so, than the children who had the benefit of those crib viewings. People are beginning to question the entire baby-video industry, thank goodness:
Dr. Kuhl's most recent work proves videos ineffective in teaching babies foreign languages. In her July 2003 experiment, Kuhl showed that exposing 10-month-olds to videos and DVDs of native Mandarin Chinese speakers had zero effect on their language development. But if that video is replaced with a living, breathing, person speaking Mandarin, babies showed great learning of that language in a short time period, according to her report. Even though Aigner-Clark had good intentions with her language video, Baby Einstein does not teach babies foreign languages–only live people can do that. And without specifically mentioning the company or its products, Kuhl's research actually debunks Baby Einstein's theory that certain videos could create little "Einsteins." In The Scientist in the Crib, the trend of making babies smarter is referred to as "pseudoscience, " warning parents to be deeply suspicious of any enterprise that offers a formula for making babies smarter or teaching them more, from flash cards to Mozart tapes”¦ these artificial interventions are at best useless and at worst distractions from the normal interaction between grown-ups and babies. (Kuhl, et. al., 201)
In addition, the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation of no television for kids under the age of two isn't registering with parents either. The Kaiser Family Foundation's media study reported that nearly half (49%) of all parents consider educational videos "very important to children's intellectual development."
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