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Sesame Street, delays language development

This should not be news to anyone. Television is not good, television actually is evil. That and corn of course.

But seriously folks, Kids do not learn from television, they learn from interaction with adults. Tube sucking, that is a term for infants watching television, it may be a great babysitter but it delays development of verbal skills. Verbal skills are the foundation of learning. That is why the education establishment freaks out on delayed verbal development.

The claim always seemed too good to be true: park your infant in front of a video and, in no time, he or she will be talking and getting smarter than the neighbor’s kid. In the latest study on the effects of popular videos such as the “Baby Einstein” and “Brainy Baby” series, researchers find that these products may be doing more harm than good. And they may actually delay language development in toddlers

University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. “The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew,” says Christakis. “These babies scored about 10% lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos.”

Sorry guys, but it looks like you are going to actually have to parent. Believe me I have suffered with this also, my two younglings are not allowed to watch TV, ages 7 and 4. Consequently they are active, highly mobile, and loud. They are loud. You know, they’re kids.

The Time magazine article.

Does this not ring true?

As far as Christakis and his colleagues can determine, the only thing that baby videos are doing is producing a generation of overstimulated kids. “There is an assumption that stimulation is good, so more is better,” he says. “But that’s not true; there is such a thing as overstimulation.” His group has found that the more television children watch, the shorter their attention spans later in life. “Their minds come to expect a high level of stimulation, and view that as normal,” says Christakis, “and by comparison, reality is boring.

This has been known for years.

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