Society & Culture - Posted by Melanie Moran-Vanderbilt on Friday, November 12, 2010 17:28 - 4 Comments 
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(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Turn off TV and talk to babies
Using television as a virtual babysitter in hopes of providing very young children with educational information is no match for interaction with parents or other familiar figures. (Credit: iStockphoto)
VANDERBILT (US) — Infants gain little to nothing from watching popular educational videos, according to a new study, which finds they learn best with face-to-face interaction with parents and other familiar figures.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
“After watching a video designed to teach vocabulary for a month, the infants did not know any more of the words than children with no exposure to the video,” says Georgene Troseth, associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University.
“Babies enjoy watching the videos, but don’t expect your child to learn much from them.”
The research is in press at the journal Psychological Science.
American parents spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on videos and DVDs designed and marketed for infants, a trend that began in 1997 with the release of the first Baby Einstein video.
Parents also tune in to regular television with their children, with more than 70 percent of mothers of young children reporting that they believe children learn from television. But little research has been done on whether or not that is actually true.
To determine if babies were learning from video, Troseth conducted a four-group experiment to measure how many new words 12- to 18-month old children learned from viewing a popular DVD.
In the first, parents watched the video with their child at least five times a week for four weeks in their home and were told to interact with their children in whatever way seemed natural as they watched the video.
In the second group, the children watched the video alone for the same amount of time as the first group.
The third group of children did not watch the videos at all. Parents were instructed to try to teach their children the same words found on the video during their everyday activities.
A fourth, control, group of children did not watch the video and did not receive any special vocabulary instruction from their parents.
The children were tested before and after the experiment for their knowledge of the 25 words presented in the video.
The highest level of learning was among children taught by their parents. The children who watched the videos learned no more than the children in the control group who received no special exposure to new words.
Parents who liked the video tended to overestimate its benefits, saying that their children were indeed learning from it.
“During these months of late infancy, children undergo a ‘vocabulary spurt’ when they learn new words on a daily basis,” Troseth says.
“If children have been watching videos, parents may attribute normal vocabulary growth to media exposure.”
More news from Vanderbilt University: www.vanderbilt.edu/news
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4 Comments
Frances Morey
Tont Tromp
Autism is not something a child suddenly get (like fobia’s). They are born with it.
Not to mention the autism epidemic is mostly due to better diagnosis combined with media popularity and fear, making a what is really a mostly manufactured epidemic. And yes, children are born autistic, not turned by videos.
Frances Morey
Except in one case I know of–friends of mine whose child was developing normally until age three. The autism set in suddenly. Now at age four he can no longer talk and reverted to requiring diapers. It is baffling. Two other siblings are quite normal.
Wonder if the autism epidemic is related to parents spending their time watching television more than interacting with their infants? Could inattentive parents be as deleterious as missing parents? Just a thought.