Educational DVDs for babies are one of the fastest-growing, lucrative, and competitive business segments today. The aggressive marketing of many of these DVDs convince parents that they will make their child smarter. Three quarters of the 100 top-selling DVDs for babies from birth to two years claim to have educational benefits.
More and more research, however, is concluding otherwise. Child development experts are repeatedly finding that not only is there no evidence that DVD learning is beneficial but it is developmentally inappropriate and can actually be harmful. There is no FDA1 for children’s products, so companies can make claims without solid research to back them up.
Baby Einstein DVDs, for example, are highly used learning tools and are trusted by parents worldwide. However, Disney has recently offered a refund for Baby Einstein videos in response to their inaccurate claims that they are educational. According to the Boston Group, Disney is also no longer describing their Baby Wordsworth products as a “rich and interactive learning experience that.....fosters the development of your toddler’s speech and language skills.”
A study done in 2007 by Dimitri Christakis, (director of the Child Health Institute at the University of Washington) and colleagues Meltzoff & Zimmerman, found that for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them.
An additional problem (though much less discussed) is that DVDs and many educational baby products tend to encourage learning the wrong targets at the wrong time. Children are being encouraged to learn concepts and skills at earlier and earlier ages. For example, baby videos commonly teach shapes to infants. Parents may not realize that this is not a meaningful target until the age of 3 or 3½. Yet it is the focus of DVDs, toys, and books directed at children as young as 9 months. The same goes for learning colors, letters, numbers, etc.
So what’s the harm, you may wonder.
Choosing targets that are not meaningful to early communicators and are not yet relevant to their lives, can lead to frustration and behaviour challenges and can decrease their natural enthusiasm for learning. On the other hand, when you select targets that are functional and meaningful for a child and that are within the natural progression of their learning, they pick it up more easily; they can experience success using what they’ve learned in meaningful situations; and they find that learning is exciting and fun and makes a big difference in their lives.
Here are some ideas for parents that want to have a positive effect on their child’s development in the first few years. Aside from interacting with a caring and responsive human, one of the most important things to consider is that you are focusing on developmentally appropriate and meaningful learning. For example, from 9 to 18 months, this is the time that you can build a child’s base vocabulary in real life experiences (while exposing them incidentally to all kinds of concepts and information). Learning the labels for mostly objects around them (ie. mom, blanky, milk) and some actions (ie. up, go) can make communication very powerful and functional for them. Compare a child saying “apple” and getting the apple to the child calling a circle a circle. In the former example they have experienced success and power over their world. In the latter, at most, they may get praise for getting it right. In general, the best order for early vocabulary development is nouns, then verbs, then descriptors (most of the time!).
About the Authors:
Megan Stock, MSLP and Nicole Diduck, MSLP are authors, speakers, and the founders of Naturally Baby, a company that provides powerful information and products for parents to set their children up for social, emotional, academic, and literacy success. For more information, please e-mail info@naturallybaby.com or visit www.naturallybaby.com
1The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a government agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is responsible for regulating and supervising the safety of foods, tobacco products, dietary supplements, prescription and non-prescription medication, vaccines, biopharmaceuticals, blood transfusions, medical devices, electromagnetic radiation emitting devices (ERED), veterinary products, and cosmetics.
Source used for this article: “Parenting, Inc.” by Pamela Paul
