No Brainiacs

Michigan's New York Times, the Detroit Free Press, ran an article recently about all those baby-enhancement videos. You know the kind: Baby Genius, Baby Einstein, Brainy Baby. Sales of these "kid-vids" hit $4.4 billion in 2004 and the pressure to buy them ("What? You want your child to be an idiot?") is intense, despite an advisory from the American Association of Pediatrics that children under two should watch no television, and despite a lack of evidence about the effects of these videos (much less any proof that they help).

"Parents should understand that all of that marketing is just that--marketing," said Elizabeth Vandewater, director of the Center for Research on Interactive Technology, Television and Children at the University of Texas. "There's no evaluative research. We have no idea what the effects are, let alone that they are educational."

We've never used kid-vids. Mrs. Scheske watched one of them years ago and said it "freaked her out." Few people have an intuition better than Mrs. Scheske's, especially when it comes to raising children. We'll stick with reading to our kids.