The harsh bite of the press release has lost its sting!

The lawyers at Disney are still reeling from it all!

The parents of DVD-watching youngsters now lock their doors when the DVD powers up!

The manufacturers of these edutainment products shake their head and hope it all passes before the holiday buying season sets in hard!

To what am I referring?

The infamous paper published early August from researchers at the University of Washington and the Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute that (bottom line) stated that the DVDs we have been allowing our children to watch while we  get dinner cooked, iron some clothes or (heaven forbid!) finish a few sentences with our spouse have been causing a loss of vocabulary acquisition!

Now, never mind that the group of children they ’studied’ was very small in size and forget the fact that they never even laid eyes on any of these little tykes, they simply called up mommy and daddy on the telephone, grilled them about their children’s vocabularies and wrote this damning paper.

Don’t get me wrong - as a teacher I feel that limited use of TV is good for the future of this already stimulated generation of children.  And don’t think that just because I create, produce and sell just exactly the types of DVDs these researchers refer to in their report I am taking a strong stance against their findings.  That is not it at all.  (I have four bilingual music CDs that would sell the pants off of any of the DVDs should the DVDs be banned from stores like OJ Simpson’s new book!!!!)

All I am getting at is that, as women, as moms, as aunts, as caregivers most of us have used DVDs with the young children in our lives at some point and time, and those same young children are not destined to live with 28 less vocabulary words than their peers who never had the pleasure of seeing some cool footage from the African savannah with baby lions wrestling the grass as they learn lion/león for second language fun!

The study encourages parent interaction (which most of us all would vote for it placed on a ballot!!!) yet they never once engaged with or set eyes upon their subjects! 

We know interaction with children promotes learning!  DUH?!?!  We did not need a team of researchers who seemingly publish a paper for nothing more than to stir the Baby Einstein/Disney Pot and instill a sense of doubt among young and old parents who strive only to give little junior a head start (and themselves a free moment here or there!) with the comfort of knowing that these quality productions bring visual and audio learning to little ones never before available.

Be it Boca Beth or Baby Einstein, Brainy Baby or Preschool Prep…..can’t everyone just admit that there is merit to all of these multimedia products, and when used correctly and not ad nauseam, can truly enhance the early years of learning for toddlers and make a new parent’s and/or experienced parent’s life more doable?!?!

Happy Educating!  ¡Sea feliz educando!

Boca Beth

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 7:43 am and is filed under Teacher Mom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.