New studies confirm that children do not learn more with educational DVDs

The arrival of the DVD was a change in our lives on many levels. Interactive content, menus to navigate through them, games, etc. were added to the usual videos and movies.

These possibilities began to squeeze various brands and manufacturers of products for babies and children by releasing DVDs intended for them with videos that alternated colorful images in motion, classical music and words.

The success was resounding, being the main brand of that revolution "The Baby Einstein Company", founded in 1997. Millions of parents bought their children DVD to learn words, music and ultimately to be more intelligent, because this was what That was promised.

There are already several studies that show that this is not true and these days, studies that confirm that Children do not learn more with educational DVDs, but, in fact, they seem to learn less.

What the studies say

Rebekah A. Richert, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Riverside conducted a study with 96 babies between one and two years of age and did not find that there was a direct relationship between the time children spent exposed to an educational DVD and the general development of children's language.

Seen this way, one may think that "well, even if he doesn't contribute anything, at least it entertains them" and, although it is true, the study showed that Children who began watching educational DVDs at an earlier age had lower results in tests related to language ability.

In a later study at the University of Virginia it was concluded that the children who watched educational DVDs did not learn more words than the children of a control group, who did not watch them. Again it was shown that children who learned more words were precisely those who were not exposed to any video.

These studies confirm the recommendations of the AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics), which has long advised that television time be limited in children under two years of age as much as possible. A spokesman for the AAP expresses it as follows:

We kindly urge the parents of children under two years to avoid time in front of the screen with their children. The game is the work of childhood. Sitting in front of a screen is not the job of childhood.

Marketing strategies

Many will then ask where the success of educational DVDs comes from, well, the answer is simple: it is about an impressive marketing strategy that managed to convince everyone, with titles like Baby Mozart, Baby Beethoven, Baby Van Gogh, Baby Shakespeare and a long etcete, parents believed the illusion that watching television children would become smarter and smarter.

The reality, as we have seen, is that babies are not able to connect what happens on the screen with the objects, sensations and experiences of their daily lives.

In other words, children learn more from life itself than from the representation of scenes and situations on a television. The experiences of children with an environment and with people produce feedback because children are immersed in these situations. Thus they learn the words, hearing them repeatedly in different contexts, with different shapes (there are spoons of many types, colors and shapes, despite being all spoons) and coming from different people.

This is also how languages ​​are learned, immersed in them, listening to them in different situations and contexts, not always seeing the same image always saying the same word, without the possibility of interaction (they will also learn something, but always less than with human contact ).

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