Librarians: Forget Baby Einstein; Try Reading
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By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 10/29/2009
Librarians and media specialists are secretly saying "I told you so" about the Walt Disney Company’s decision to issue a full refund on the Baby Einstein videos that parents have bought by the millions over the last five years.
While stopping short of admitting that the 30-minute videos, which often feature classical music or introductory sign language lessons, didn’t turn babies into geniuses, the extensive refund offer from Baby Einstein does
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Baby Einstein is issuing full refunds for videos purchased over the last five years. |
“Rather than talk to them, a book talks with them,” says Pat Scales, past president of the Association for Library Service to Children. “It becomes interactive between the child, parent, and book. We want them to develop language, and I can always tell a child who has been read to.”
The push against Baby Einstein began in 2006, when the nonprofit Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) complained to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about the educational claims being made by Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby, another company that creates DVDs, toys, and other products for the preschool-and-younger crowd.
“We want to help parents make decisions on real research and information, not on what ifs,” says Josh Golin, associate director for CCFC.
In 2001, the American Academy of Pediatrics set a policy advising parents and educators against “television viewing for children younger than 2 years.” Since then, studies on the effect of television, computers, and video games on children and infants have shown that television or video viewing doesn’t seem to independently improve cognitive and language skills for infants and toddlers—but that reading and talking with a child does.
And yet it’s the parents of this preschool age group that Baby Einstein is precisely marketed to—children who are beginning to understand and make sense of their world.
Four calls placed to Eric Maehara, vice president of worldwide communications for Disney, were unreturned. But the brand’s general manager, Susan McClain, made her thoughts loud and clear on how the brand has been “under attack by propaganda groups” as she posted on the company’s Web site on October 25.
McClain goes on to say that the new refund offer, for anyone who has purchased a video in the last five years, is just an extension of the one currently in place for a 60-day money-back guarantee, and that the brand does not claim that Baby Einstein is educational.
“But look at the name,” says Golin. “Einstein has a very specific connotation.”
