Article 19 readers won't be shocked by a new study in the Journal of Pediatrics. We've covered this ground before, but here it is one more time and slowly for our friends with smaller vocabularies: Sitting your infants in front of Baby Einstein videos does not make them smarter; if anything, just the opposite.
For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as "Brainy Baby" or "Baby Einstein," they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found.
Parents aiming to put their babies on the fast track, even if they are still working on walking, each year buy hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of the videos.
Unfortunately it's all money down the tubes, according to Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle.
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Christakis said children whose parents read to them or told them stories had larger vocabularies.
"I would rather babies watch 'American Idol' than these videos," Christakis said, explaining that there is at least a chance their parents would watch with them — which does have developmental benefits.
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