From Time.com:
----snip----
Sunday, Jan. 08, 2006
By Pamela Paul
Thomas Bausman, 2, and his brother Jake, 10 months, are typical
American babies. Every day, Thomas settles down to watch two hours of
television, while Jake sits in front of the set for an hour, the
national average for their respective ages. Their favorite thing to
watch, by far? Baby Einstein. Anita Bausman could not be more pleased
with her children's preference. Jake, she reports, learned colors,
numbers and his love of robots from the popular videos, which are
filled with puppets, animals and moving objects, often set to classical
music. "It's not just turning on Nickelodeon," Bausman says. "It's
educational and beneficial. I know he's happy watching, and I can pop
in and point out something onscreen, then go deal with the laundry."
Bausman's
attitude is typical of U.S. parents. In a 2004 Kaiser Family Foundation
study, more than half of the parents surveyed said that educational
videos and toys are "very important to children's intellectual
development." Efforts to get kids on the Ivy League track now begin at
infancy, and in the past few years, the so-called edutainment market
for babies and toddlers has exploded. According to Vicky Rideout, vice
president of the Kaiser foundation, in 2003 there were 140 videos or
DVDs for kids age 2 and younger for sale on Amazon. Today, there are
750.
Many of those products bear enticing messages on their
packages: "stimulate baby's cognitive development" or "increase baby's
brain capacity." But according to a new study, "A Teacher in the Living
Room?," by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the companies do essentially
no research to back up their claims. Nor can they cite research by
others that relates specifically to their products. "We're not
neurolinguistic scientists," admits Marcia Grimsley, a senior producer
for Brainy Baby, purveyor of such DVDs as Right Brain and Left Brain,
which claim to develop the creative and logical components of a baby's
mind. "We went out and researched other people's work—scientists,
neurologists, psychologists—and applied that knowledge to our products
so they could be fun and beneficial to parents and children."
The
unspoken assumption behind most of those products is that stimulation
is good and that more stimulation is even better. But that's not
necessarily so, says Meredith Small, an anthropologist at Cornell
University and author of Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture
Shape the Way We Parent. In fact, she says, "there's a growing thought
that maybe Americans are overstimulating their babies, or stimulating
them in the wrong ways."
There's a basic misunderstanding that
stems from studies of children and laboratory animals that were starved
of attention and stimulation, says Pat Levitt, director of the
Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development. "Everyone
heard about the orphans in Romania who were deprived of stimulation as
babies, then had learning and emotional problems later," says Levitt.
But just because a normal environment is better than a deprived one,
that doesn't necessarily mean that a hyperenriched environment is
better still. As Levitt puts it: "There is no evidence that says you
can drive the baby's system to ever greater heights."
In
fact, there is evidence to the contrary. According to Dimitri
Christakis, codirector of the Child Health Institute at the University
of Washington, "The more TV babies watch, the more likely they are to
have attentional problems later in life." Christakis cites a long-term
study that tracked children from age 1 through age 7. It found that for
each additional hour of daily TV viewing before age 3, a child's
chances of later developing problems paying attention increased 10%.
Christakis
explains that the human mind—especially the mind of a baby—is driven by
what Ivan Pavlov (of the famous dog) called the orienting reflex. When
a baby is confronted with a novel sight or sound, he or she can't help
focusing on it. By rapidly changing colors, sounds and motions, videos
for children effectively force a baby's brain to stay at attention. If
his or her gaze wanders, the action quickly rivets it back to the
screen.
"Parents say, 'My child can't stop looking at it! She
loves it!'" Christakis says. "Well, true, she can't stop looking at it,
but that doesn't mean she loves it." Not only might Baby not be
enjoying the program, Christakis says, "but based on the research I've
done, there's reason to believe these products have deleterious effects
on the developing mind." Christakis is not alone in this thinking. The
American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV viewing of any kind
before age 2.
CDs and DVDs designed to teach a baby Spanish or
Chinese are also problematic. Patricia Kuhl, who studies language
acquisition at the University of Washington, conducted an experiment
comparing the effects of Chinese audio recordings for children and a
Chinese-speaking human. She had a native Mandarin speaker play with a
group of babies while speaking Chinese for 12 sessions of 25 minutes
each over a four-week period. Later she tested the babies and was able
to demonstrate that they recognized Mandarin sounds. But when she
repeated the experiment with three control groups—one set of babies
that saw the Chinese speaker play with babies on video, another that
listened to an audio recording of the Chinese woman playing and a third
that had no exposure to the Chinese speaker—none seem to perceive
Mandarin sounds. Apparently, the presence of a living, breathing human
was essential.
There's a lesson there for any parent who wants
to encourage early learning. Most experts agree that what matters most
is not what toy the baby plays with but the ways in which you interact
with your child. "There's no question that the experiences a child has
in its first year are crucial for cognitive, emotional and physical
development," says Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at Chicago Medical
School and author of What's Going On in There? How the Brain and Mind
Develop in the First Five Years of Life. "But the good news is none of
this costs any money. Babies prefer humans over anything inanimate."
One
key difference between human interaction and even the most
sophisticated educational toy is that interpersonal exchanges engage
all the senses—sight, sound, smell, taste and, very important, touch.
"People tend to forget that children are very tactile and their most
sensitive part is their mouth," says David Perlmutter, a neurologist
and author of the forthcoming book, Raise a Smarter Child by
Kindergarten. "Babies need to mouth things and to smell, to have rich
sensory experiences."
This is borne out by a new
study of 96 babies conducted by Andrew Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks at
the University of Washington. Meltzoff and Brooks knew that long before
babies learn to talk, they form emotional connections with parents and
caregivers by looking into their eyes. But there's a big cognitive leap
between looking at someone's eyes and following that person's gaze to
see what he or she is looking at. By tracking at what age babies learn
to follow an adult's gaze, Meltzoff and Brooks have been able to
establish an early indicator of language ability. It turns out that the
earlier a baby follows the gaze of an adult (generally between 9 months
and 11 months), the more advanced his or her language skills are at age
2.
"Babies read their mother's faces," explains Meltzoff,
co-author of The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us
About the Mind. "Being able to read other people and their intentions
and to know what they're thinking about is key to language development."
Babies
can also read signs. Psychologists Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn,
co-founders of the Baby Signs Institute, conducted a long-term study
with 140 families funded by the National Institutes of Health to see
whether teaching sign language to babies before they can talk helps or
impedes language development. The results were surprising. Babies
taught to sign at 11 months tested 11 months ahead of other babies in
terms of vocabulary and linguistic ability by age 3. At age 8, signing
babies scored higher on IQ tests than the control group. While many
psychologists agree that teaching sign language probably does babies no
harm, others have questioned the methodology of the research that shows
signing's benefits. Moreover, the research that's been done has focused
on signing as taught by trained parents. Today there are a slew of new
videos and DVDs purporting to teach babies to sign, and no one has
studied their effectiveness.
Of course, parents don't have to
learn sign language to be active participants in their babies'
development. For the past 20 years, New York University developmental
psychologist Catherine Tamis-LeMonda has been observing babies as they
interact with parents in "naturalistic" environments—at home, running
errands, going about their everyday lives—to see how adult involvement
affects language acquisition. Through longitudinal studies, she's
documented that the more parents respond to babies' cries, expressions
and articulations, the earlier the children will talk and the more
advanced their language skills will be at age 5. Parents who respond to
babies' cues—reacting to grimaces and giggles, mimicking their sounds,
extrapolating from "bababa" to "bottle," labeling things they
touch—help their children acquire language. This responsiveness,
however, should not be forced. "If you're not enjoying yourself while
playing with that baby, it's not going to do any good," Tamis-LeMonda
cautions.
That's because babies are remarkably
attuned to emotions. The best—and easiest—gift a parent can give his or
her child is relaxed time when the parent is focused on the baby and
follows the baby's lead. If the baby grabs at waxed paper, the adult
can repeat the word paper and show him or her how it makes noise or how
it can be crumpled. "The infant brain craves novel stimulation, but
that can be found in ordinary nonstructured, nonmarketed things around
the house," says Ross Thompson, a psychologist at University of
California at Davis and one of the founders of the National Scientific
Council on the Developing Child, a research organization of scientists
and experts on early-childhood development.
Babies need to learn
how to master new situations, but they also learn through repetition
and thrive on predictability. "Having rituals, like bedtime and
mealtime routines, brings order to babies' lives, which helps them
organize their thinking," explains Tamis-LeMonda. Being able to
anticipate future events as well as remember and create memories of
past patterns fosters cognitive development. "Babies are very good at
tracking statistical information in their environment," says Laura
Schulz, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at M.I.T. "They're
incredibly sensitive to human action and to intentional acts in the
world. They watch what people are doing to learn causal connections."
Babies will grab the same object over and over, replicating
experiences, testing them out, conducting their own experiments. If I
smile, will Mommy smile back? Providing babies with consistent actions
and reactions helps them make sense of their world and the people in it.
"When
a 9-month-old raises his arms to be picked up by Daddy, that
demonstrates an incredibly complex chain of learning," says Claire
Lerner, director of parent education at Zero to Three, a national
nonprofit focused on early-childhood development. "First the child has
to have an emotional connection to his father. Then he has to form an
idea: I want to be picked up. Then he has to know to raise his arms. In
that tiny vignette, you can see how complicated a baby's development
is."
And how simple it is to reinforce that learning. Just pick up the baby, and start cuddling.
Do These Toys Work?
BABY'S FIRST STEPS ITALIAN Parents and caretakers, not CDs, are best for teaching languages
BABY EINSTEIN These programs grab attention but don't create geniuses
BIG
FROG They may be cute, but don't expect interactive stuffed animals to
teach a baby numbers, colors or shapes. A teddy bear without batteries
is just as good for cuddling and imaginative play
PICTURE CARDS
Flash cards may help students cram for the SAT, but experts agree that
the cards are inappropriate for babies younger than 2
YOUR BABY CAN READ Cognitive scientists say that babies forced to watch a DVD daily are memorizing responses, not reading
BRAINY BABY Doctors recommend no TV or videos before age 2
-----snip-----
Monday, Aug. 06, 2007
By Alice Park
The claim always seemed too good to be true: park your infant in
front of a video and, in no time, he or she will be talking and getting
smarter than the neighbor's kid. In the latest study on the effects of
popular videos such as the "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby" series,
researchers find that these products may be doing more harm than good.
And they may actually delay language development in toddlers.
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."
It's not the first blow to baby videos, and likely won't be the
last. Mounting evidence suggests that passive screen sucking not only
doesn't help children learn, but could also set back their development.
Last spring, Christakis and his colleagues found that by three months,
40% of babies are regular viewers of DVDs, videos or television; by the
time they are two years old, almost 90% are spending two to three hours
each day in front of a screen. Three studies have shown that watching
television, even if it includes educational programming such as Sesame Street,
delays language development. "Babies require face-to-face interaction
to learn," says Dr. Vic Strasburger, professor of pediatrics at the
University of New Mexico School of Medicine and a spokesperson for the
American Academy of Pediatrics. "They don't get that interaction from
watching TV or videos. In fact, the watching probably interferes with
the crucial wiring being laid down in their brains during early
development." Previous studies have shown, for example, that babies
learn faster and better from a native speaker of a language when they
are interacting with that speaker instead of watching the same speaker
talk on a video screen. "Even watching a live person speak to you via
television is not the same thing as having that person in front of
you," says Christakis.
This growing evidence led the Academy to issue its recommendation in
1999 that no child under two years old watch any television. The
authors of the new study might suggest reading instead: children who
got daily reading or storytelling time with their parents showed a
slight increase in language skills.
Though the popular baby videos and DVDs in the Washington study were
designed to stimulate infants' brains, not necessarily to promote
language development, parents generally assume that the products'
promises to make their babies smarter include improvement of speaking
skills. But, says Christakis, "the majority of the videos don't try to
promote language; they have rapid scene changes and quick edits, and no
appearance of the 'parent-ese' type of speaking that parents use when
talking to their babies."
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."
He and other experts worry that the proliferation of these products
will continue to displace the one thing that babies need in the first
months of life — face time with human beings. "Every interaction with
your child is meaningful," says Christakis. "Time is precious in those
early years, and the newborn is watching you, and learning from
everything you do." So just talk to them; they're listening.