Parents, Wake Up -- 'Educational' Videos for Babies Don't Work

Color me surprised. Another study has come out saying that educational videos for infants are not helpful, and might be harmful. This latest study is set to be published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine in May -- and it reports that educational DVDs aimed at infants are not likely to boost their word power.

Yes, I too am shocked (shocked!) that sticking your 1-year-old in front of the DVD player for an hour a day will not, in fact, turn her into a prodigy.

The APAM study is not the first with this finding. One done almost three years ago by researchers at the University of Washington and published in the Journal of Pediatrics said that infants who watched educational DVDs not only didn't pick up vocabulary any faster than their counterparts, but in some cases they were slower. One of the founders of Baby Einstein multimedia products filed a lawsuit earlier this year against the university, demanding that researchers provide him with their raw data and methods. But Baby Einstein offered customers refunds for their videos last fall -- an offer, The New York Times notes, that came after the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood lodged a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and threatened a class action lawsuit, saying that claims the DVDs were educational ran counter to recommendations that infants not watch television.

As the Times notes, the videos were popular enough in 2003 that a third of babies between 6 and 24 months old had watched one. So, the better question may be not whether a DVD can teach an infant vocabulary, but why parents kept buying them.

One possible reason is that they probably seemed to work.

Here's why: The videos are recommended for babies 12 to 24 months old, and 18 months is generally when a child's grasp of language expands at a markedly faster clip -- so much so that researchers from the University of Iowa who looked at language acquisition during that age termed it the period of "vocabulary explosion." So, many parents do see their baby's vocabulary beginning to build, though it has nothing to do with the videos.

Researchers in the APAM study did note at least one correlation with vocabulary scores: Infants who watched DVDs scored lower on a vocabulary test as children. Our vocabulary word of the day: irony.