Baby Einstein
If you heard the State of the Union speech, you know that in his list of a few American heroes that were there, Bush included the woman who started the "Baby Einstein" company - the one that makes videos that supposedly make your very young children smarter. This seemed a strange choice to me. I was already annoyed by the idea of this company even before we started wondering if TV exposure to children under 2 might be responsible for some serious developmental problems in some.

So I called up our resident expert on all things educational and all things child, Stevie T (sorry Steve - I know it's a burden, but you can handle it). He says the phenomenon can be blamed on the "Mozart effect" people that convinced us all that listening to Mozart will make your babies smarter. Baby Einstein, he says, is controversial but isn't much criticized (yet) because no thorough study has disproved the company's claims.

And I was thinking about that conversation when I read Slate's critique today. Here's a snippet:

What is Aigner-Clark's achievement? She got rich marketing videos to infants. No one told the president, I presume, that this profit-making scheme ignores advice from the American Academy of Pediatrics that children under 2 years of age shouldn't watch TV.
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"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."
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There's a sucker born every minute, but only a select few get to be president of the United States.