Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. “The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew,” says Christakis. “These babies scored about 10% lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos.”
As far as Christakis and his colleagues can determine, the only thing that baby videos are doing is producing a generation of overstimulated kids. “There is an assumption that stimulation is good, so more is better,” he says. “But that’s not true; there is such a thing as overstimulation.” His group has found that the more television children watch, the shorter their attention spans later in life. “Their minds come to expect a high level of stimulation, and view that as normal,” says Christakis, “and by comparison, reality is boring.”
Baby Einsteins: Not So Smart After All - TIME
The Walt Disney Co. is expanding a refund program for its “Baby Einstein” videos for toddlers in response to challenges about the legitimacy of its educational claims.
The company upgraded a customer satisfaction program beginning last month by explicitly offering cash refunds on any DVDs bought from June 5, 2004 to Sept. 4.
Disney Expands Its “Baby Einstein” Refunds - CBS News
Basically, sit with your kid, talk to them, make faces and take things slow. Kids brains while are sponges, are slow ones, so it takes them time to absorb things. By the time the screen flashes to the next “educational” stimuli, their brains haven’t had the time to actually hardwire to it and instead in the end they learn nothing.