Saturnday Consumer Awareness : Baby Einstein DVDs Turn Infant Brains into Mush

I remember a bit of conversation I had with a friend of mine who was a housewife, where I was complaining to her about my job stresses:

Gina: I have a pretty stressful job too, you know.

Jerkface Me: What job? Oh wait, lemme guess, you’re a mommy??? Ha! Ha! So what? I own two cats, but you don’t see me going around calling that my job. “Hey everybody! Not only am I a Web Developer, but I also own two cats!” what’s the big deal about kids anyway? You just sit them in front of the TV for 18 years.

Gina: You are so lucky I’m not there to kick you in the nuts.

Of course I was joking. Kids today are splitting their time between television, game consoles, and computers, and while I find that latter two improvements because they are engaging and interactive; kids are still spending too much time in front of these things, at the expense of their physical health.

Baby Einstein DVDs Make Babies Dumb

Still, it’s better to be a flabby nerd than a meatheaded jock. So it was with this in mind that I bought a gaggle of those Baby Einstein videos for a coworker’s baby shower two years back. While I thought this was a cool gift, several of the mother’s at the event made comments that my gift wasn’t exactly practical for a newborn, and things like teething rings and clothes might have made more sense.

Obviously, I figured, they were jealous of how much smarter my coworker’s baby was going to be than their comparatively late-blooming children. But now I am mulling this study from the University of Washington, which found:

The researchers interviewed the parents of more than 1000 U.S. children between the ages of 8 and 16 months, gathering information on the children’s vocabulary and how frequently they watched videos like Baby Einstein. When the team controlled for factors such as socioeconomic status, race, and parental education, it found that Baby Einstein and his ilk are not the geniuses they’re cracked up to be. For every hour per day spent watching the videos, children understood an average of six to eight fewer words than did those of the same age who did not watch them–a 17-percentile drop in vocabulary.

But wait! Walt Disney company is demanding a retraction (PDF Warning) of the University of Washington’s press release:

…while the press release touts that the study’s conclusions are based on a survey of 1008 parents of children aged 2 to 24 months, after a closer examination, its critical conclusions on the impact of baby videos on infants eight to 16 months is based on a much smaller sample of only 384 children. Of this group, 44 percent watched no television of any kind, leaving a total of only 215 infants with some television viewing– but with no indication whatsoever as to how many of this smaller number watch any baby videos, much less Baby Einstein videos specifically, at all. The study was also based on telephone surveys, not active observation.

Hmmm… This is a tough call. As UoW researcher Frederick Zimmerman points out in the article, Disney hasn’t done any research at all on their products’ effectiveness. At the same time, Disney claims that UoW’s research wasn’t good enough; although, the sample size was fine and telephone surveys are pretty standard.

I could rationalize this; after all, people have done so in the past when Big Tobacco told them smoking was harmless, and people are doing so now as Big Oil tells them Global Warming isn’t real. We should expect Disney to have their own study proving Baby Einstein DVDs are beneficial any day now, and we all know they don’t have any agenda in producing such research, which will surely be completely unbiased.

In the meantime, I think I have a moral obligation to let my friend know about this development, which will disincline him to set his infant down in front of the television with the Baby Einstein DVDs, and thus render my gift worthless.

From now on, I’m only buying diapers for expecting mothers. You can’t screw that up… unless I buy toddler size, but they’ll grow into those.