iamausername

When children learn to communicate with other people, the majority of the communication is physical, eg: eye contact, body movements etc..

If someone watches tv, the people on tv talk to the camera, and therefore the person watching it.

The only problem is, if this happens, none of that body language exists between the people, it is one way only.

This might make the brain develop these skills differently, or not develop them properly.

I am thinking that an extended use of tv, especially from an early age would lead to slower growth in personal skills and probably other social aspects, even further along in life.

I am interested in anyone's comments on this.

Nimetic

As I understand it, there are studies showing precisely that.

Charlatan

I just love that all the smug yuppie parents who went on and on about Baby Einstein have now been proven wrong.

Of course, human interaction is more important than a box with pictures.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

JumpinJesus

We learn to communicate when we copy the language (both verbal and nonverbal) of those around us, parrot it back to them, and receive some sort of response.

When you mimic communication but there is no response, then you're not really communicating at all. You can't socialize or develop social skills if you can't communicate.


Kill your television.

__________________
"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

mixedmedia

Well, that's if you allow your television to teach your kids how to communicate.

I have a novel idea! Talk to your children.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

AYHJA

I only think that this would be true if every child were the same, growing up in in the same situation, etc..

Point is, we just put to much stock in the outside influence...Anyone who has really put in the work and raised a child knows that TV can't hold a candle to real parenting...

abaya

Yep, the results are in... fuck Baby Einstein videos.

Talk to your children. Make eye contact. Say silly words and let them repeat them back to you. Magic!!!

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

roachboy

sometimes i wonder if watching alot of tv fucks with your sense of the present tense of verbs. it models your relation to the world, teaches you to be a powerless spectator watching Events and Adventures happen to Things, all of which are beyond your reach. training in passivity then, but more than that.

burn it.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

raveneye

Well, Albert Einstein himself didn't learn to talk until he was 4 years old, so maybe the video really is entirely successful in turning your baby into a little Einstein

Plan9

The Misfits wrote a good song about this:

TV Casualty.

Do we watch it? Does it watch us?

It watches us die.

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

ASU2003

I didn't realize there was such a thing as eye contact until I was 23. My head might have been pointed in their direction, but making eye contact or using any body language never happened.

I probably watched some TV growing up, played the Nintendo some, and played by myself quite a bit. Home computers connected to this 'Internet' hadn't caught on yet. But I also think my friends in school had the same experience. So, I don't think they really noticed. At least I hope they didn't notice.

Ourcrazymodern?

[QUOTE=ASU2003]I didn't realize there was such a thing as eye contact until I was 23. making eye contact or using any body language never happened.

Please make eye contact and don't be disturbed by it - relish it because it's the only way we have to see into each other's souls.

Unless you trust the words that come from another's mouth?

TV has taught us all things we wouldn't have learned without it.

You shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

Ustwo

While I'm against the TV as a baby sitter, and I keep TV away from my son for his first year +, its quite amazing just how much he does pick up from some decent children's programs, including learning how to sing, which he just started to do a few months ago.

There is nothing inherently wrong with TV and children, but taken to an extreme of course it can be wrong.

As for the Baby Einstein thing, I wasn't fond of the videos when I saw them as they seemed to be a recipe for ADD. Lots of colorful images very fast, nothing on the screen long enough to really focus or think about it, so we have a bunch that were given to us that we didn't use. On the other side though I think that 'study' is sort of bogus. They used vocabulary as a marker for intelligence, which would be rather shaky in a toddler as a measuring stick I think. Since Baby Einstein doesn't have speaking in their videos (at least the ones for very young children) its very understandable that those children would have a few less vocabulary words as compared to someone watching say, G.I. Joe. Really the concept behind Baby Einstein is sound, but the effect is unknown, and I think nothing measurable will come from it either way.

They really haven't been proven wrong. I just used the magic power of google and the third hit is a very nicely done piece by my favorite skeptic Steven Milloy. He gets labeled of course as a right wing hack since he shares my opinion of the global warming hysteria, but his analysis seems to be spot on, unless Baby Einstein is part of the NWO of course.

" "Is Baby Einstein doing your child more harm than good?"

The answer to that question, posed by the cover story of Time magazine (Aug. 27), may depend on how you feel about drive-by product disparagement committed by anti-TV fanatics.

The Time article was spurred by a recent study published in the Journal of Pediatrics by University of Washington researchers who reported that each hour per day of viewing baby DVDs and videos (such as the Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby products) by 8- to 16-month-olds reduced their vocabulary by seven words as compared to those who did not watch.

The university aggressively marketed the UW study with an unusual media release that targeted specific brands that parents were urged to "limit the amount of time they expose their children to DVDs and videos such as Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby."

Researchers Dimitri Christakis and Frederick Zimmerman fueled the fire with colorful but rather non-scientific sound bites, including: "It’s not the first blow to baby videos and likely won’t be the last," and "I would rather babies watch 'American Idol' than these videos."

Ensuing media headlines followed a predictable course, ranging from "Baby Einstein Videos Ineffective, Study Finds" (National Public Radio) to "Study Shows 'Smart Baby' DVDs Slow Language Acquisition" (NBC News) to "Videos as a Baby Brain Drain" (Los Angeles Times).

Web sites ran even more sensational headlines: "Baby Einstein Sucks the Vocabulary Out of Your Kid's Brain" (Seattlest.com) and "The Parent Crap: Babies Raised by Videos Approximately as Dumb as Expected" (Gawker.com).

While I don’t know whether infants actually benefit from baby DVDs and videos, that's an extremely complex issue that would take a great deal of intensive and intrusive study to resolve, and the inadequate UW study certainly fails to show they cause harm.

First, the study is small. Although the researchers touted the inclusion of 1,008 children in the study, only 384 children were between the ages of 8 months and 16 months. Only 215 of those engaged in any TV, DVD or video viewing. It’s not clear how many children watched baby DVDs, but the answer is likely fewer than 215.

The number watching for one hour or more per day is likely fewer still. Next, the validity of the raw data is questionable. Data on viewing habits were collected by a telephone poll of parents. The researchers didn’t observe or validate any of the data collected and parents may easily have over- or underestimated their children’s actual viewing habits.

It’s also quite possible the data are biased, potentially skewing study results, since they weren’t collected from a representative sample of the general population. Study subjects were drawn from limited geographic area on the basis of telephone number availability.

Telephoned parents could decline to participate. Moving past the study’s questionable data, the researchers' technique for measuring child language development also is problematic. While the so-called MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, or CDI, seems to be a reliable assessment tool for older toddlers, its application to 8- to 16-month-olds is not so reliable, according to a study published in the journal Child Development (March-April 2000).

The researchers nevertheless compared CDI scores to the claimed time spent per day watching the following types of media: baby DVDs and videos; children’s educational shows; movies and children’s non-educational TV; and grownup TV.

The only activity negatively correlated in a statistically significant way with CDI score was watching baby DVDs and videos. That correlation reportedly was about 10 times greater than that for grownup TV.

So the researchers jumped to the conclusion at least for the purposes of media consumption that the baby DVDs and videos reduced vocabulary development.

But not only is it highly inappropriate to leap from mere statistical correlation to cause-and-effect conclusions particularly based on a small and novel study with dubious data, the researchers would have us believe that watching baby DVDs and videos is much worse than watching grownup TV in terms of child vocabulary development.

Why would this be so? Absent a plausible explanation, the University of Washington didn’t return my call or e-mail, so none seems forthcoming that the result may be chalked up to unreliable data and analysis.

Baby DVDs and videos weren’t associated with reduced vocabulary development among the study's 17- to 24-month-olds. For the older toddlers, watching baby DVDs and videos correlated with a similar positive effect on vocabulary development as story-telling and music-listening.

Did the alleged adverse effect of baby DVDs and videos disappear with age or was it entirely bogus to start with?

The researchers admitted in their study's fine print that they didn’t directly test whether baby DVDs and videos had an actual positive or negative effect on vocabulary acquisition. They also quietly acknowledged that the study's correlative nature "precluded" drawing causal inferences and that their results could have been affected by biased and incomplete data.

While they remembered or were compelled by the Journal of Pediatrics' editors to note these "major limitations" in their write-up, Drs. Zimmerman and Christakis seemed to suffer mental lapses when it came to statements they made in media interviews.

And why let a few facts including the researchers' history of alarming parents about children watching TV, DVD and videos (more than 10 publications since 2004) get in the way of their scare?

This sort of junk science often goes unchallenged by its victims in the vain hope that the fuss will blow over. In this case, however, the Walt Disney Co. (owner of Baby Einstein) demanded that UW retract its media release, according to the Denver Post.

Disney refused to say whether it might sue, but the egregious conduct surrounding this study would seem to make for a pretty good test case of whether agenda-driven researchers can blithely smear commercial products despite knowing that their attack is groundless."

People need to learn when they see a 'science' story in the news you are only getting about 1/10th if that of what the study really says. Dont' forget these are the same news agencies that told us Blonde hair was going extinct in 250 years and I saw someone got them to say the same thing about Red hair in the last few months.

The reason this is news is so they can scare those same horrible smug yuppie parents (helps ratings) and make others like you feel smug at them being wrong.

Science and informing the public have very little to do with it.

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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

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Charlatan

Actually Ustwo... given the amount of research I did into whether the research about the negative effects of Baby Einstein were valid or not is entirely besides the point. I was actually just reacting to the slap up side the head that yuppie parents received (in particular, smug ones).

I hate nothing more than someone telling me, in the most smug fashion possible, how I "should" be raising my child (yuppie or otherwise). I just happen to find yuppies more annoying because I come into contact with them more frequently than I do bloody hippies.

As for television, given my career, I would say that I am the last person to speak disparagingly about TV. That would be like you speaking poorly about good dental hygiene.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

Racnad

I don't have kids, but the other day in a parking lot I did see a car with two baby seats in the back, and two LCD screens attached to the back of the front headrests.

It just seemed wrong to me.

skada

my first post ..

well i dont really believe its wrong to mix tv & kids ... and actually there is no harm with kids which are 5+
obviously assuming parents are having some talk wid ém
a part from freakonomics ..
In Finland, whose education system has been
ranked the world’s best, most children do not begin school until age seven but have often
learned to read on their own by watching American television with Finnish subtitles