In Defense of Baby Einstein: The Educational DVDs May Not Teach Kids, But They Help Parents

Another day, another study showing that “educational” programming for babies isn’t. The latest research, which came out yesterday, shows that infants between 1 and 2 don’t pick up any language skills from Baby Wordsworth, a DVD in the Baby Einstein series. The paper adds to a huge body of evidence that, with very few exceptions, TV shows and videos are at best no help in teaching anything to young kids.

I have an 11-month-old, so I’ve spent the past 11 months—scratch that, 20 months—being inundated with messages about how best to raise a child. Also, before my daughter was born, I made an extensive study of Baby Einstein and other supposedly enriching media for infants as part of a cover story for our Japanese edition. The story isn’t online, but here is what it said about the DVDs:

They probably don’t harm kids, per se, unless they’re used at the expense of parent-child interaction. But that’s the problem—too often, they are serving as the latest variation on the “electronic babysitter” ... Every developmental psychologist interviewed for this story had harsh words for [Baby Einstein]. All of them pointed out that it isn’t interactive—it bombards young kids with images and sounds but doesn’t give them feedback when they respond ... Rather than plop your baby in front of a DVD—even an educational one—psychologists say it’s far better to read to him.

There’s nothing factually wrong in this paragraph. It could appear in any of the articles that came out yesterday about the new study. But, reading it now, I’m struck by how naive it sounds. It’s the kind of thing that only someone who doesn’t have a kid would write.

To be sure, many young kids watch a lot of TV, much more than they should. The gold-standard report on children and media is the Kaiser Family Foundation’s “Zero to Six” survey from 2003, which finds that 43 percent of kids under 2 watch TV every day; almost a third of kids under 3 have TVs in their bedrooms; and two thirds of kids under 6 live in houses where the TV is on for at least half of waking hours.

The report also says that parents of young kids “are significantly more likely to say TV ‘mostly helps’ children’s learning (43%) than ‘mostly hurts’ it (27%),” and that they “consider educational TV shows (58%) and videos (49%) ‘very important’ to children’s intellectual development.”

But there’s actually a bit of good news buried in the Kaiser report. Kids aren’t just sitting in front of the TV all day. They’re also reading:

Despite the plethora of new media, reading continues to be a regular part of young children’s lives. In any given day, nearly eight in ten (79%) children six and under will read or be read to, and those who do spend an average of 49 minutes reading.

The report also notes that “kids who live in ‘heavy-TV’ households are less likely to read every day (59% v. 68%), and spend less time reading when they do read (6 minutes less a day).” Six minutes less a day? That’s statistically significant to researchers, but is it really something the rest of us should panic about? And wait—given that one in four Americans didn’t read a single book last year, isn’t it kind of heartening that 59 percent of kids in heavy-TV households are reading for 43 minutes a day?

I’m sure there are many households that really do consider TV to be a great all-day form of entertainment (or, shudder, “edutainment”). These are genuinely kids we should be worried about.

But this is not a reason to reel back in horror if you walk into a house and spot a Baby Einstein DVD. It’s possible to use such programming in a healthy way: “thinking of it as an occasional treat, rather than as part of your arsenal for educating your child,” says Rahil Briggs, a child psychologist and director of the Healthy Steps program at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

The thing is, raising a small child involves a lot more than sitting in the playroom, giggling together over a pile of board books. There’s also washing at least three loads of clothes per week, vacuuming up the dust bunnies so the baby doesn’t eat them, preparing healthy meals and chopping them up into tiny pieces, scrubbing the dishes (and the highchair, and the floor under the highchair) clean of all the pieces of food the baby deems inedible. Sometimes it is impossible to do these things with one arm while holding your darling (or, possibly, screaming) child in the other and murmuring sweet, interactive, educationally edifying things in her ear. At these times, you may need that electronic babysitter, not to help you ignore your kid but to help you take care of her. And that’s OK.

If you think my tone is giving my personal bias away here, you’re right. There was an evening a few months ago when my husband was working overnight. My daughter was sitting in her highchair in the kitchen, covered in (homemade, organic, hand-pureed) spinach. I needed to run a bath for her, but I couldn’t—there was nowhere safe to put her in the bathroom, she was too filthy to go into her crib, and she wasn’t sufficiently distracted by any of her (wooden, nontoxic, developmental) toys to allow me to slip out of the kitchen for a minute without her. So I got my laptop, put it on the kitchen table, and YouTubed this Baby Beethoven clip:

Guess what happened next?

Nothing. My daughter’s head didn’t explode at the first sight of the dancing, violin-playing teddy bear. She didn’t go glassy-eyed and start drooling more than she normally would. Actually, she didn’t seem interested in the screen at all. She did, however, enjoy the next thing I rang up, a beat-box clip from Yo Gabba Gabba:

(That’s right, my daughter prefers Biz Markie to Beethoven; she is cooler than I am.) She also enjoyed the bath I was able to run while she was chilling with Biz.

I haven’t actually bought any baby DVDs, because I don’t really need this trick that often. And I certainly don’t think there’s any chance that my daughter’s rare viewings of snippets of kiddie programming have made it any more likely that she’ll grow up smart. She’s turning 1 this week, and she’s a bright kid who says “mama” and “dada” and “dog” and “duck” and “ball” and “book”—words she learned from her dad and me, not from a DVD. You can bet that when she gets older, she’ll have strict limits on how much television she can watch. As for having a TV in her bedroom—are you kidding? We don’t even have cable.

But the next time I need a quick hit of YouTube to pacify my daughter, I’m not going to feel guilty about it. The kiddie-DVD industry hasn’t made her into Einstein—but it has made sure she’s properly fed, clothed, and bathed even at the most harrying of times. That, in its own way, is genius.

MARY CARMICHAEL is a NEWSWEEK senior writer. 

Parents of these babies could have used some down time: visit Newsweek's gallery of amazing multiple births. Then, read the inspirational story (with fantastic photos) of two Chinese twins separated at birth, only to be adopted by American families and reunited as children.