And how do I break it to my mother that those Baby Einstein DVDs weren’t such a good deal?

My parents are big proponents of educational TV, but then again, they grew up only watching TV for an hour or two every night because that was the only time the rabbit ears could pick up a decent signal.

For them, TV is almost a miracle made available to the masses.  It’s entertaining and even, gasp, educational.  So educational, in fact, that my mother invested in a gagillion Baby Einstein DVDs in order to give my niece, who she babysits regularily,  the best environment for learning.

I’ve been a little less interested.  As you probably know, the American Academy of Pediatrics doesn’t recommend that children under 2 even watch TV.  Despite that, the TV is on too often in my house and I know it.  J, who was never going to watch TV, ever, now can hum along to the songs in Noggin’s Wonder Pets series (and so can I, as all I can hear in my head these days is “The phone.  The phone is RINGING!“).  I certainly don’t need to be hunting down DVDs so that I can spend even less time talking to my lovely little boy.

Thank God for that.  Several news outlets, including Newsweek, are reporting that the Journal of Pediatrics just published a study about the ineffectiveness of the baby-focused videos like the Baby Einstein series.  It’s worse than ineffective, though.  Read on:

“Exposure to educational shows, like “Sesame Street,” and non-educational ones, like “SpongeBob SquarePants,” had no net effect on language, researchers said—but for every hour that infants 8 to 16 months spent watching the baby DVDs, they understood six to eight fewer words, out of a set of 90, than infants who didn’t watch. ” (Newsweek: August 20-27, 2007)

The DVDs always seemed a little odd to me.  So often you’ll see that a picture of an object will pop up on the screen and its name will be announced–which is very much a bad way to teach vocabulary at the levels I’m teaching it.  I can’t believe that it would be so different for the kidlets.  It’s so important to use the words in context…that’s how we all learned all those words we use every day in the first place.  How do we learn?  We learn by being spoken to and being interacted with, and the DVDs certainly aren’t doing any interacting.  Only we can.

Parents happen to do it very well.  We–and that includes me–need to remember that we instinctively know how to teach our kids these basic skills.  We don’t need any special, expensive DVD or software to do it.  Our kids just need us.

Oh, and for the Bush haters among us, during the State of the Union address this year, our fearless leader honored the creator of Baby Einstien and called her a generous social entrepreneur. Entrepreneuer, yes…the brand she created cashed in $200 million in sales for Disney last year.  Generous and social?  I don’t know about that–those videos seem to hurt more than help.

Huh.  Is that all you have to do to get honored during a State of the Union?