Disney: Baby Einstein Has Zero Gravity
Posted on October 24, 2009
By Joe Miller |
Directly on the heels of Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman’s child-rearing book, “Nutureshock” being released last month, Disney announced Friday it will refund $15.99 for up to four “Baby Einstein” DVDs per household purchased between June 5, 2004, and Sept. 5, 2009. The Baby Einstein series may not only fail to make kids smarter, but may also dumb them down, according to a Pediatrics journal report concluding that baby videos, like “Baby Einstein,” led infants who watched them to have smaller vocabularies compared to the kids who didn’t. The American Academy of pediatrics has recommended that children under 2 be exposed to no television time at all.
The whole thing about exposing children to rinky-dink arrangements of classical music to improve their intelligence is also out the window. In Einstein Never Used Flashcards, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, PH.D., and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, PH.D. cite the 1993 University of Wisconsin research study that led to the intensity about exposing kids to classical music (kids who listened to the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K448 scored higher on a spatial reasoning test). But THAT study was refuted by Nature, Psychological Science, and Harvard University, which collectively concluded that the effect of classical music on spatial ability was short-lived AND had nothing to do with overall intelligence/academic performance.
I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go out and find my 6-month-old a set of good old-fashioned blocks.
