Baby Einstein Isn't Smart
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
One of the odd things about the State of the Union speech on Tuesday night was seeing the woman who invented Baby Einstein sitting in the First Lady's Box. Like any new parent, I can easily find a stack of Baby Einstein videos around my house. For those of you who haven't seen them, they are smartly packaged, brilliantly named, inane videos that involve close-up, colorful shots of toys mixed with classical music. I hate them, along with most of the other videos. Mrs. Feiler Faster, it must be said, loves these videos. Let's just say it's a disagreement between us. I get that sometimes dinner simply cannot be cooked and the cab cannot be loaded for a trip to the airport without popping in a video. I'm not a total dope here. But for daily use, I don't like them at all, notwithstanding all the experts who recommend no television for those under two.
Sitting in the First Lady's box will be Julie Aigner-Clark, the founder of the Baby Einstein juggernaut. Aigner-Clark's great innovation was to take random "baby-friendly" images pair them with classical music and convince a generation of parents that this was good for your child. Oh, if it were only so!
The "Mozart effect" underlying these products has been proven to be a sham (not to mention that the original experiments never tested the effect of classical music on children). Exposing small children to television may be the cause for all those children running around with ADD. And some have gone so far as to blame TV watching among small kids for the uptick in autism rates.
In the reality-based world, Baby Einstein actually isn't that good for your kids. Yet, Aigner-Clark is given the seat of honor.It makes you wonder if someone in the White House watched too much TV growing up.
Posted by B Feiler at 5:11 PM
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I had never heard of these comments about Baby Einstein. I am a grandmother and my grandkids were raised on the tapes. I happen to like them, but I realize that not all people do. They served a good purpose when my grandchildren were young and those grandchildren have now gone on to bigger and better things. In my opinion, much of children's TV is inane.