Posted on 10/24/2009 4:49:10 AM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
Parent alert: the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those ”Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses.
They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect.
“We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds,” said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years.
Baby Einstein, founded in 1997, was one of the earliest players in what became a huge electronic media market for babies and toddlers. Acquired by Disney in 2001, the company expanded to a full line of books, toys, flashcards and apparel, along with DVDs including “Baby Mozart,” “Baby Shakespeare” and “Baby Galileo.”
The videos — simple productions featuring music, puppets, bright colors, and not many words — became a staple of baby life: According to a 2003 study, a third of all American babies from 6 months to 2 years old had at least one “Baby Einstein” video.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Face it, folks. These things never had a chance of working.
Kids are chuckleheads - your included. Just unclench and enjoy the glorious mess that they are until they turn into teenagers and suddenly know way more than you ever did ;-)
Parents who want their children to be Democrat United States Senators purchase and use “Baby Frankenstein.” But it’s only worked once so far.
Yikes - that should be “yours included.”
Now who’s the chucklehead?
I prefer to look at kids 0 - 3 or 4 as acid heads. Certainly for the first year almost everything is brand new and, "Oh wow, man" worthy to them ... sights, sounds, smells, tastes, ... everything.
They are also absorbent little sponges, just sucking up and in everything they receive ... especially language.
The true chucklehead is the younger teenage boy ... 12 - 15 or 16 ... now THERE is a specimine of life-form that defies logic, reason and perhaps even definition.
I was always amused by those parents who would pipe the music of Mozart into their baby’s room for hours on end in an effort to make him/her “smarter.” Not that the music of Mozart isn’t pleasant to listen to but but it’s just funny how people will superstitiously do things that have no basis in scientific fact just because they read about it in a magazine article somewhere - or saw it on Oprah.
LOL!
I’d never return the videos we own. My son loved them. I never had the expectation that he’d become a genius from watching them, either.
You have the option of choosing which language the show is in. I usually picked French or Spanish, and he learned quite a few words in those languages as a result. He’s 3 now and every once and a while, I’ll let him watch one. He gets nostalgic - if that’s possible for a 3 year old.
Any parent who expected their kid to get much of anything out of those videos needs their head examined.
We played classical or jazz at times to our sons. Never hard rock or heavy metal. They seemed to turn out okay.
I wonder what little tykes turn out like if they are exposed to Ozzie Osbourne or some other heavy metal rock band for extended periods?
30 minutes of blank tape...
Hearing-impaired, probably. My family has a Spanish church band, and the little boys get confused when they hear Christian music in English ... but the teens still insist on listening to metal. I assume they’ll grow out of it eventually.
Don't be sayin' bad stuff about Ozzy. Your touching on a personal soft spot!
hehe
Probably was a better influence than Deadwood DVD’s.
How about some Baby Limbaugh CDs and DVDs? Have to turn the kids away from early. Maybe even some prenatal version just so the kid isn’t warped by the obstetrician. :-)
My 9 year old grand son is precocious, he's already there.
Like sleeping with a book under your pillow to absorb what's in it.
Cheers!
Surf on over to DU for the answer.
Cheers!
Cheers!
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