Slate: Bush's Baby Einstein Gaffe

[deadparrot]

In his Jan. 23 State of the Union address (click here for the video), President Bush paused briefly to pay tribute to a few everyday American heroes who'd been brought to the Capitol to sit beside his wife during the speech. It's a State of the Union tradition that began in 1982, when Ronald Reagan saluted Lenny Skutnik, a federal employee who, two weeks earlier, had plunged into the icy Potomac during a snowstorm to rescue the survivor of an airline crash. For the succeeding 25 years, every January some hapless White House functionary has been called upon to find a few new heroes to park next to the first lady in the House visitor's gallery. The supply was bound eventually to run a little thin, but whoever chose Julie Aigner-Clark, founder of the Baby Einstein Co., should have done a little more research.

...

Baby Einstein is part of what Alissa Quart, in an August 2006 piece in the Atlantic ("Extreme Parenting"), called the Baby Genius Edutainment Complex, an industry that preys on the status anxiety of neurotic parents who, until Aigner-Clark and others told them otherwise, didn't sweat the meritocratic rat race until it was time to place their pint-sized strivers in preschool. That changed in the mid-1990s, when Don Campbell, extrapolating wildly from earlier research involving college students that, Quart writes, has never been duplicated, trademarked the slogan "Mozart effect" and used it to market classical-music CDs for infants. Aigner-Clark followed suit with her Baby Einstein videos in 1997.

"Essentially," Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan Lynn told the Chicago Tribune "Media Mom" (and occasional Slate contributor) Nell Minow in December 2005,

the baby video industry is a scam. There's no evidence that the videos are educational for babies, and a review of the research on babies and videos concludes that while older babies can imitate simple actions from a video they've seen several times, they learn much more rapidly from real life.

http://www.slate.com/id/2158226/

[Norrin Radd]

1. The obvious thing to consider is

that neither Einstein nor Mozart needed videos as a baby.

The repukes need to keep their commercials out of the SOTU address.

[Dogmudgeon]

7. Give the kids real Mozart records and math toys

All three of my nephews were raised by Baby Einstein, and two of them started speaking so late that they were suspected of being autistic.

A sample of two subjects, obviously, is a poor basis on which to make decisions about millions, but could it hurt to turn the TV off occasionally and get kids interested in math or music?

--p!

[fasttense]

2. I wondered about that

too. She was a housewife in the burbs who developed a video tape for babies. Start them young watching the tube I guess. I wasn't too impressed by her. But I think they were hurting to find a woman, since all the others were men.

[YOY]

3. Yet I like the Leapfrog toys...

I especially like this one:



Then again this is for 8+...

[Oleladylib]

4. As a daycare operator..I can conclude that the BEV's are baby-

sitting mesmerizers that aren't even as stimulating as Elmo and Big Bird...How DID we raise our kids before these things?

[Arkansas Granny]

5. Since my children are adults, I have no experience with

baby videos. However, as a mother of 4, I don't believe that a video is a substitute for the face to face interaction that babies recieve from parents and caretakers.

[Lisa]

8. my folks read to me, played with me, and took me on nature walks ...

I didn't actually see much TV until I was already in primary school. I don't feel that I was deprived by not having baby videos -- somehow I managed to get my PhD and am now teaching college classes!

[yellowcanine]

6. Right wingers fancy themselves educational experts. They are the ones pushing all day academic

kindergartens and phonics only reading progeams. Truth is, too much emphasis on academics in kindergarten is a bad idea because it can frustrate kids who aren't ready for it and actually turn them off reading and arithmetic. It is far better to focus on socialization skills and games that teach kids to classify objects. Case in point - my own daughter and several of her classmates from a cooperative kindergarten that focused on those areas. Their first grade public school teacher was upset that this group of kids did not know how to read. Guess what, by Cristmas, every one of those kids was reading above the level of the rest of the class.

[TrogL]

9. I played Stockhausen for my babies

Maybe that's why they all turned out bonkers.

[LouisianaLiberal]

10. My first laugh of the day!

:rofl:

[kickysnana]

11. Baby Einstein is not gong to make genius but used wisely is not harmful either.

Kicky who just turned four had partial cranial stenosis. His skull fused too soon. Our family have notoriously big heads so standard tests did not detect it early. He started having symptoms shortly after he turned 12 months. He had horrible headaches and nightmares. He forgot how to talk at 13.5 months. He started falling many, mnay times a day at 14 months. He would wake after an hours sleep sobbing. I finally got through to my son that he had to have his wife tell the doctor about this at 15 months. He was diagnosed at 16 months but surgery did not take place until 18 months. They never gave him any medicine besides ibuprofen or Tylenol for his symptoms.

Mom worked nights and slept during the day. Dad worked days and we all spent evenings together with a very, very fussy child who they blamed me for spoiling. My son would try to calm him for an hour or more overnight and then bring him down for me so he would have enough sleep to do his very physical job the next day.

Having MS I knew a thing or two about pain so I staggered the doses of Tylenol and ibuprofen so that he was never without pain meds when I was in charge and at night the only thing that would get him to sleep after sobbing for a couple hours was Baby Einstein especially the Baby Santa. He didn't care about other "brainy" videos and just plain music did not have the same effect. Before a year he would listen to a few minutes of them and lose interest.

As he recovered he no longer needed them but enjoyed them for 15 or twenty minutes when he was winding down to a nap or bedtime after a storybook. Delightfully He became too active for me to chase 5 days a week and went into regular daycare. His Greatauntie and I have since moved to an apartment

I would never advocate numbing a normal child over long periods of time but if you have fussy child and are working and trying to run a household 30 minutes a couple times a day of Baby Einstein, if they will watch it all, is not going to ruin your child. Our local NPR classical music station does minibiographies of artists and many times I hear people say that their love of music came from exposure to classical music from the old cartoons, the ones people said were mind numbingly bad for us.

BTW. Kicky is now a very healthy, normal, active, four year old.