Do Baby DVDs Help Babies Learn?

http://www.jconline.com/article/20110124/LIFE08/101240303/Do-baby-DVDs-help-babies-learn

Many parents believe that educational DVDs have helped their toddlers acquire language skills. However, a recent study says that young children do not actually learn from baby DVDs that market themselves as educational tools. The researchers also found that parents who liked the DVD tended to overestimate how much their children learned from it. The study was published recently in the journal Psychological Science.

Toddlers between the ages of 12 and 18 months participated in a month-long study. Some of the children watched a best-selling educational infant DVD several times a week. Half of them watched alone and the other half watched with a parent.

Another group of babies had no exposure to the DVD. Their parents were asked to try to teach them the words from the DVD during everyday interactions.

The results were clear. The children who had extensive exposure to the DVDs, either with a parent or alone, did not learn any more new words than children who had no exposure to the DVD, according to the study.

DeLoache said it's easy for parents to attribute a child's natural learning process or vocabulary spurt --a period of rapid word learning that occurs between 18 and 30 months -- to these DVDs. But language development occurs naturally in children as long as parents are talking to them, she said.

Although there is nothing inherently wrong with allowing children to watch the DVDs for a reasonable amount of time, parents should not use these DVDs as a babysitter in lieu of actual interaction, said Judy DeLoache, University of Virginia psychologist and study co-author.

"Children really like to watch these," she said. "(But) there are two things to worry about. One is parents having a greater expectations than can ever be fulfilled and another is the tendency to park a child in front of the TV and just leave them there."