Baby Einstein...It's Crap?

Ok, so my mom calls me yesterday after spending all weekend at some conference on learning and education. (she is a teacher) Anyway, she calls to tell me that one of the topics discussed were the baby einstein videos. Basically, not only will they not help my childrens brains develop, they are completly harmful! Apparently they have done a bunch of studies and for every 1 hour watched it can reduce a childs vocabulary by 6-7 words!! Once again, I feel like mom of the year. It didn't help that my one child who never watched the videos has the best vocabulary and spoke the fastest. So, in my despair over possibly having to get rid of one of the best inventions I had found to make my babies happy, I decided that maybe it wasn't true. Everything is at least worth a google search right. Well... here is what I found...

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.

Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the 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."

Oh well, I guess it's ruined for me. One more thing on a long list of things to feel guilty for in the life of being a mom.

So, the real question is do I feel guilty for the damage I have already done or do I feel guilty because in all honesty, I wish I had never discoved this and could have gone on watching and loving the videos in blissfull ignorance, thinking I was such a great mom by helping my babies brains to develop. Yeah, sometimes ignorance is a great thing..... If I just ruined it for you as well, sorry. At least now we can complain together!