Is your baby a Brainy Baby?

Abstract

Though the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no “screen time” for children under age two, parents routinely ignore this edict, exposing their children to television and the educational “baby videos” that have become exceedingly popular over the past decade. This project studied this baby video phenomenon in three phases: 1) a qualitative content analysis of the marketing and advertising of two industry leaders, Brainy Baby and Baby Einstein; 2) interviews with parents of children ages one to two regarding their beliefs about and experiences with baby videos; and 3) a quasi-experiment with children in the second year of life, utilizing a one-group pretest-posttest repeated measures methodology to test whether children could learn picture-letter pairings in the short term from several viewings of Brainy Baby’s First Impressions: Letters video. Results revealed that the companies’ marketing and advertising strategies fell into three broad categories: educational, credible, and aspirational. Interviews uncovered that parents routinely let their children under two watch television and videos alone, often giving parents time to do housework. In general, parents expressed that while they believe the baby video companies want consumers to think the videos are educational, parents are actually skeptical of the educational value. Yet, these parents continue to allow their children to watch. Additionally, parents reported hearing positive comments from fellow parents about baby videos, but they are generally not being asked about their child’s video and television habits by pediatricians. The results of the quasi-experimental portion of the study revealed no significant findings. Thus, in the short term, there was no detectable learning found. Trial-by-trial analyses revealed that children between ages one and two do not perform any better than chance on repeated posttests. In sum, children under age two did not learn from the DVD.