TV is not going to help boost your baby's IQ

I read a very interesting article today on CNN. A study was performed by the Researchers from Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and Harvard Medical School, to challenge the usefulness of baby educational videos and DVDs. Baby Einstein DVD's have been a very popular brand over the last few years. Many parents have purchased them thinking that they will in fact make their child smarter, increase their IQ or teach them to speak earlier. These studies have proven otherwise.

"Contrary to parents' perceptions that TV viewing is beneficial to their children's brain development, we found no evidence of cognitive benefit from watching TV during the first two years of life," the authors wrote.

Educational DVD and videos geared towards enriching babies and toddlers, such as "BabyGenius," "Brainy Baby" or "Baby Einstein," which proclaim to "encourage discovery and inspire," have no benefits, researchers said.

"The best thing for our kids is to provide them with stimulus that we know is positive for their brain development," Rich said. He suggesting activities like reading, singing, interacting and stacking blocks to help children.

Yet another study was performed in 2007 by the University of Washington.


"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."

Unfortunately in today's society many parents use their television set as their baby's babysitter or tutor in some cases. Children need one on one interaction not with the television set but with their parents.

To continue reading the remainder of these articles please visit

Study: Want a smart baby? TV's not going to help
and

Baby Einsteins: Not so smart after all