Tidbits
Shockingly, Baby Einstein videos don’t make your kid a genius. I will be the first to admit that, as a parent, I’m susceptible to drinking the Kool-Aid that is the marketing of children’s products, but I never got into Baby Einstein. Some friends of my parents (incidentally, these friends were very into products and were the type who insist on $800 strollers because obviously that’s the only good and safe stroller) who had their first baby about a year before I had the baby gave me some of their videos, but I was just really uncomfortable with the idea of the baby watching TV. My general guideline was that he wouldn’t watch it regularly until he was 2 and we were able to stick to that more or less. That’s not to say that I shielded him completely from it, but I just didn’t really present it as an option. Now, of course, he seems to be on a mission to make up for those two years that I cruelly kept him from the joys of Cartoon Network.
Anyway, Baby Einstein…it just seemed like bunk and while I guess you could say that they would be a good tool to use with your baby, I have yet to meet the person who can honestly sit through one of those videos more than once. They’re boring.
In other news, PUPPIES!
Completely unrelated to anything mentioned above, I’m finding that I still feel very awkward in this new forum, like I’m still finding my voice. It’s all very dramatic. I need a room of my own!
August 8th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Puppies! Puppies! Puppies! So fricken cute.
As for Baby Einstein, I really wonder about the methodology of the study. I really doubt that the kids of parents who put them in front of BE for ten minutes every day to take a shower are the ones in question.
Of course, I don’t have kids yet. Mainly it would totally cut into my TV viewing schedule and we cannot have that.
August 8th, 2007 at 11:31 am
Yeah, I never got the whole Baby Einstein thing. I got one from the thrift store and we watched it once and I was like “WTF? It’s just classical music with a bunch of shots of toys moving around? This is the wonder-video I’ve been hearing about?”
August 8th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
i’m not a parent. (yet.) but it seems like common sense to me. children pick up a great percentage of their learned behavior from interaction, not placidly watching a tv screen.
if you extrapolate the theory out to its absolute extreme, you’d have to believe that the brainwashing scene from “A Clockwork Orange” is scientifically sound.
August 8th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
I always thought that if you opted to have your very young child watch TV, Baby Einstein was as good a choice as any, but I think you’d have to be a little deluded to think that it actually made your kid smarter in a vacuum.
I got the original one from NetFlix just to see it, and I really didn’t follow. I mean, I’m all for learning to count in lots of languages, but the audio and the visual didn’t really match up: I mean, while the voice counted in Japanese or whatever, there was nothing to indicate that that’s what it was doing, there was just a picture of a candle or a duck or whatever. I just didn’t understand what the child was supposed to learn, and how.
August 9th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
We like the Baby Einstein movies for a few good reasons, none of them being really what was purported on the claims made by the makers themselves.
First off, we have a multi-age homeschooled kid clan here, and they all actually like to watch them while they are whirling through the living room, discuss them, act them out, and interact with each other over them. It is pretty neat to see them all do this, and we ended up buying the whole set on Ebay just for that fun. They have been nothing more than an addition to the world of words around them, and the later movies are a bit clever and cute..they remind me of some of the earlier Sesame Streets, which were just awesome.
Also, they do promote language quite a bit, moreso the later ones, admittedly. If they are used in addition to all sorts of other experiences in the world, they are a good thing, and I don’t need a double-blind study to establish that.
The sad thing is, we are led to believe that with a scientific study there is suddenly authority about what is right and correct and good for our kids….scientific studies said cigarettes were fine and dandy once too!
We need to follow our gut instincts as parents, and not let our lives be ruled by studies. I question all theories and studies, even my own…because science is nothing but a bunch of popular belief backed up by facts that sometimes change.
I don’t believe it is all good or all bad…they are just a tool like anything else, and can be used or misused.
*stepping off soapbox* ^__^
August 9th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I think the study was mostly a response to the claims that Baby Einstein was making, and they were pretty heavy-handed with the “will definitely make your kid smarter” shtick. At this point in time, for whatever reason, parents seem to be very insecure about the intelligence of their children and doing what they can/should be doing in order to make them as brilliant as possible. This includes playing classical music through headphones while in the womb, Leap Frog toys, etc. To me, BE videos seemed like just another Thing to Buy that played on these insecurities. I don’t think any of the above are necessarily bad, but should all be viewed as merely aides.