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Your child would love watching this video, but she’d also love eating cotton candy and drinking grape soda. Many pediatric and psychological studies have shown that young children know FEWER words for every hour they spend watching videos like this one. Why? Because they aren’t spending time with YOU, practicing their language and social skills. There’s also evidence that young children who watch TV have a greater risk of developing ADHD. Last, toddlers who grow up in homes with the TV always on in the background literally seem to have more trouble hearing themselves think. This hurts their developing linguistic abilities and consequently their abilities to engage silent reasoning.

Please protect your child — don’t let her watch any TV during her early, crucial, developmental years. We only watch TV when our little girl is asleep.

Update: France just banned TV programming directed at infants.

From the Associated Press:

updated 3:35 p.m. ET, Wed., Aug. 20, 2008

PARIS – France’s broadcast authority has banned French channels from airing TV shows aimed at children under 3 years old, to shield them from developmental risks it says television viewing poses at that age.

The High Audiovisual Council, in a ruling published Wednesday, said it wanted to “protect children under 3 from the effects of television.”

France’s minister for culture and communication, Christine Albanel, issued a “cry of alarm” to parents in June about channels dedicated 24 hours a day to baby-targeted programming. In a newspaper interview, she called them “a danger” and urged parents not to use them to help their children get to sleep.

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She was referring to two foreign channels that can be seen in France on cable television, BabyFirstTV and Baby TV.

The council’s ruling aims to prevent the development of such programming on French channels. It also orders French cable operators that air foreign channels with programs for babies to broadcast warning messages to parents. The messages will read: “Watching television can slow the development of children under 3, even when it involves channels aimed specifically at them.”

The ruling cites health experts as saying that interaction with other people is crucial to early child development.

“Television viewing hurts the development of children under 3 years old and poses a certain number of risks, encouraging passivity, slow language acquisition, over-excitedness, troubles with sleep and concentration as well as dependence on screens,” the ruling said.

Read the full article at:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26312386/

A recent study has found a worrying correlation between TV viewing and autism.

Source — http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,222481,00.html:

Too much TV time for toddlers may trigger autism, according to a study by Cornell business professors.

Over the past few decades, there’s been an amazing increase in the number of children diagnosed with autism. Some experts think this is due to broader diagnostic criteria for autism. Some point to vastly increased services for autistic children. Others think that something in the environment is triggering an autism epidemic.

It occurred to Cornell University management professor Michael Waldman, PhD, that the increase in autism cases came at the same time as increased opportunities for very young children to watch TV. Could it be, he wondered, that the explosion in children’s TV programming, DVDs, VCRs, and video/computer games is behind the explosion in autism diagnoses?

Waldman asked his colleagues in the medical world to look at the issue. Nobody would. So he assembled a research team and did the study himself — using tools more often seen in economic studies than in medical studies. The results bolstered his suspicions.

“We are not claiming that we have definitive evidence. But we have evidence that is awfully suggestive of a link between TV watching and autism,” Waldman tells WebMD. “Someone should nail this down one way or the other.”

Waldman will present the study at this week’s National Bureau of Economic Research health economics conference.

What Raises a Baby’s Risk of Autism?

Rain, Cable TV, and Autism

Autism is usually diagnosed when a child is about 3 years old. Any effect of TV watching would have to happen before that age. But few studies, Waldman found, have compiled statistics on the TV habits of U.S. toddlers.

But there are statistics, compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, on when families watch TV, and on how much TV they watch. These statistics show that toddlers watch more television when it’s raining outside than when it isn’t raining.

Waldman and colleagues then looked at county-by-county autism rates in California, Oregon, and Washington. All three states have huge regional variations in annual rainfall. Sure enough, Waldman found that autism rates tended to be higher in the rainiest counties.

“We ran the tests a number of different ways, and basically every way we run it, we get the same thing. If it rains more, autism goes up. If it rains less, autism goes down,” Waldman says. “That is a fine theory by itself, but still one can’t be sure it is TV and not some other indoor toxin that is to blame.”

So the researchers did a second test: They looked at the percentage of houses that subscribed to cable television in California and Pennsylvania. Cable television, Waldman reasoned, was linked not only to more TV watching, but also to the availability of more programming for very young children.

Sure enough, they found that areas with the most cable TV subscribers had the most autistic children.

“Our view is there is no obvious thing correlated with both rain and cable TV access except television viewing,” Waldman says.

Until more direct studies confirm or disprove this conclusion, Waldman and colleagues recommend that parents follow the American Academy of Pediatrician’s recommendation of no TV before age 2, and no more than an hour or two of TV a day for older children.

Rating: 1 / 5

I’m sure Julie Clark is a very nice person with many virtues. But, she has a terrible speaking voice. This is through no fault of her own and not meant as an insult, but people should work within their talents and recognize their limitations. Instead, Clark chose herself to read her poetry throughout this video instead of hiring a professional actor. She has neither the voice (who could forget her high-pitched, juvenille “metronome” in the Baby Mozart trailer?) nor the delivery to be reading poetry in a professionally-produced, full-priced video. I understand her wanting to feature her daughters, “Sierra” and “Aspen,” in her videos, and it’s even OK that she uses close-up action shots of her own pretty hands in them too, but feeling the need to be the “native speaker of English” throughout the Language Nursery video and to read poetry throughout the Baby Van Gogh video is going too far. It’s truly grating on the ears.

That being said, my 16-month-old does enjoy the Baby Van Gogh video, about as much as he does the other Baby Einsteins… but he’s certainly not learning much humility from Ms. Clark.
Rating: 4 / 5