I started writing this post in the fall, amidst all the mad drama between the CCFC and Baby Einstein, and all the journalistic and blogging noise that came with it.  I abandoned the post, not caring to add my spit in the ocean of misinformation, but I kept the draft because I happened to love it.  I’m glad I did, because I’m incensed again after reading a painfully inaccurate listserv message yesterday.

I’m long-winded, if you haven’t noticed, so this is going to be segmented.  Today’s post is about applying common sense to the issue.  The follow-up will be about what the research actually says—or doesn’t, as it happens.

I’m not on Baby Einstein’s payroll.  I just happened to find the videos useful when the girls were little.

The imperfect parent

Parenting is challenging.  Parenting infants who don’t nap well and pretty much bawl whenever you aren’t holding them is difficult.  Parenting infants who don’t nap well and pretty much bawl whenever you aren’t holding them, without a strong support system in place, is just plain hard.  But one day you notice that your baby will stare at pretty much anything on a television screen, at least for 20 minutes, which is just long enough to grab a shower.  Hooray!

Now…what would you want to expose your child to while you grab that shower?  Probably not Quentin Tarantino.  Probably not Maury Povich, and (as much as I love it) probably not Days of our Lives, either.  Hey, what about PBS?  That’s purportedly educational, right?  Except Sesame Street is over your baby’s head, and it would be hard to live with yourself if you let them watch Teletubbies.  Cue celestial music and spotlight-from-above as you happen across a Baby Einstein DVD in the store.

Are you picking it up with fantasies of never having to interact with your child again?  Does your near future suddenly involve requesting information packets from Harvard?  No, damn it, you just really want that shower.  If you’re at all deluded, it’s that you think everyone around you is also pulling for you to have that shower.  (Trust me, none of the rest of us even noticed, let alone minded.)

The DVDs

The first thing you notice about the Baby Einstein videos is how formulaic they are.  Set to reorchestrated (“for little ears”) classical music, the early videos are a series of toys parading across the screen, short puppet skits, and scenes of babies and children playing.  These are all punctuated with painfully obvious, excessive use of video wipes, like the page turn wipe.  As any discerning parent can tell after one viewing, it’s not about to turn any child into a genius.  That doesn’t make the videos inherently bad.

After the video is done playing—at least, this is how it was when my girls were young enough to be watching them—there is a little montage, overdubbed with company info and parent testimonials narrated by creator Julie Clark.  She talks about how parents should interact with their children while the videos are playing, connecting the images on the screen with interactive learning experiences.  Baby Einstein never said, “plop your child in front of our product and they will become, like, wicked smart.”  They straight-forwardly said that parent or caregiver needs to be actively involved to make the most of their videos.

Educational value

Children are always learning.  Always, whether or not you want them to.  Like that time you dropped the pickle jar on the kitchen floor and uttered the expletives that came back to bite you at the big family reunion.  As far as I’m concerned, you can slap an educational label on anything.  If you get to call sugary cereal with 10% of the DRV of calcium a “good source” of it, then really any product that offers a smidgen of, say, shape recognition should be able to call itself educational.  “Educational” is such a vague term anyway.  How should we research it?  Standardized tests for toddlers?

Clearly you don’t know how I feel about standardized tests.

My knowledge of child development is far from extensive, but I do know a bit about emergent literacy and language acquisition.  One of the pillars of literacy is vocabulary, and (to break out the librarian propaganda) the easiest and most effective way to increase a baby’s vocabulary is to narrate what you do, and point the things that you see.  You can point things out on a walk or in a grocery store.  You can point things out on the pages of a book.  And, yes, you can even point things out on a TV screen.

Common sense

From birth throughout the preschool years, children learn primarily through play.  We all know this; despite all the conflicting theories of child rearing and education, learning through play is almost universally accepted.  Is a baby going to learn cause and effect or creative problem-solving by watching a toy parade on a video?  I think we can safely say, probably not.

Nonetheless, you shouldn’t worry that this precludes you from taking that shower.  Yes, it’s good to interact with your baby while they watch the video, but you don’t have to do it every time.  You need to take time for yourself, and your baby needs downtime, too.  Judging from my own parenting experience, the amount of stimulation an unmoderated video causes is negligible.  I’d say it qualifies as downtime, in the same way you or I might relax in front of the TV at the end of a long day.

At the very least, plopping your baby in front of Baby Beethoven while you take 20 minutes for yourself isn’t going to cause them any harm.

…Wait, there are seriously organizations that are telling us that these seemingly innocuous videos ARE harmful?!  We’ll see about that.  Stay tuned for the follow-up post, and we’ll sort it out.  And I promise to stop talking about personal hygiene.

[ Posted in » Family + Parenting Channel ]