Section 1 Within the past decade, new parents have been bombarded with advertisements of baby videos, including

Baby Einstein and other television programming promising to help develop their infants cognitive growth, development, and even their IQ. However, the University of Washington and the American Academy of Pediatrics, as well as the Childrens Hospital Boston and Marie Evans Schmidt, began to ask some questions that Julie Clark, the founder of Baby Einstein, would be unhappy to hear: Can TV actually raise the IQ of young children, or does it inhibit the necessary cognitive development in language or other skills? And is it the actual act of watching television, or is it the home life that often leads to plopping an infant in front of a screen that is the real driving force behind this language delay? The makers of Baby Einstein would tell you they exist to provide an outlet for parents to share with their children a love of humanities. Their videos are developed to be an interactive experience, not one in which the parent leaves the child to rack up IQ points and learn on his/her own. They are designed to simulate reading a book together, but allowing the parent free hands to point, clap, and have that important parent-child interaction that is critical in the development of a childs mind. They simply aim to encourage discovery. However, in light of controversial research, they ask parents to discriminate and decide what is best for their children. Ask Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis from the University of Washington, and they will tell you without hesitation that these baby videos are NOT what is best for their, or anyone elses, children. Watching baby videos is causing not just delays in learning and language development, but also overstimulation. In their study, published in the American Academy of Pediatrics, they found that every hour a day that a toddler or infant spends watching the screen, they are losing six to eight vocabulary words that one not watching these might gain. While these baby videos may not all actually claim to increase language development, they do promise stimulation for children, which may also be harmful, as overstimulation can lead to a short attention span as the child ages and becomes too bored with the real world around him/her. After discovering that 90% of 2 year olds watch television two to three hours a day, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that no child under two watch TV at all. Two years later, Marie Evans Schmidt with Childrens Hospital Boston challenged these findings with a study of their own. Keeping the mothers educational level and financial status constant, she found no link between time watching television and cognitive development, suggesting that TV watching alone is not the culprit in these lower language skills. Her studies demonstrate that a mother with less education and less income is more likely to allow her child to watch more television, and spend less time reading with them. Also, these parents often have lower vocabulary and grammar levels, providing less effective verbal interaction with the child. Schmidts studies focused on TV, not baby videos, but they show that while there may be no benefit to watching these videos, the harm comes not from the time spent in front of the television but from the effects of an uneducated, low income family.

One mother, in her opinion article in the New York Times, however, is not ashamed to admit that she did, in fact, take advantage of these videos in 2002, before any of these statistics regarding television and cognitive development were known. She points out that while a babys total screen time averages around 49 minutes a day (according to a study done by the Kaiser Family Foundation), babies are playing outside for a round an hour per day, and reading for more than 30 minutes. In most cases, infants lives are not being dominated by videos. She encourages parents to look at the three Cs-the content of the videos, the context and intention for showing them, and the child him/herself. While these videos are in no way a substitution for interaction and playing with a child, raising children is a full time, exhausting job, and there is no crime in a parent needing a break to take a shower or having a few minutes for a break. Essentially, moderation and motivation are key in determining how much television is appropriate for youngsters.