Educational videos are not going to make your baby smarter.

A lot of educational DVDs are being marketed to make babies brainier, improve their vocabulary and make them talk early. But a new study affirms what the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has claimed all along – that children under the age of 2 do not benefit from watching television. And this includes educational programs. Educational shows will only start to benefit kids past the age of 3. Only at this stage of a child’s growth, can  he already learn from a television screen. Before that, the screen is probably just like white noise to them.

Before age 3, children can only effectively learn language and concepts about the world around them if it is imparted by a human caregiver. That would be you holding an apple, moving the fruit in front of your toddler and calling it “apple”. At the toddler stage, the voice over a visual on screen just won’t impart what an apple is. Same goes for other learning concepts.

The latest study to support this claim by the AAP was conducted by the Center on Media and Child Health of Harvard Medical School. The study examined data on 872 children and their mothers. In-person visits with both mothers and babies were done right after birth, at 6 months and at 3 years old.

And what did researchers find? “Contrary to marketing claims and some parent’s perception that television viewing is beneficial to children’s brain development, no evidence of such benefit was found, ” says Marie Evans Schmidt, PhD, lead author of the Harvard study.

This is the first study that examined the long-term link between infant TV viewing and both language and visual-motor skills.

A research team from the University of Washington did a study on the link between TV and language development. In this previous study, they tested hundreds of families and found that the more babies and toddlers watched videos – particularly the educational ones – the smaller their vocabularies. Their thinking is, television took time away from real human interaction – the kind of talking and engagement needed for them to learn words at this stage of their development.

This is not to say the content of the programs were harmful. It’s just that TV messages will not register to a baby or toddler – no matter how educational or well-crafted.  The time spent looking at the screen could also have been spent playing and interacting with another person.

After age of 3, Dora, Sesame Street and The Little Einsteins can teach your kids a thing or two about words, letters and numbers. But while they’re younger than that, no one else can enrich their minds like mom and dad, or other engaging caregivers. Playing, talking, reading to them, taking them on trips to the park are the kinds of activities babies can learn from.

There is nothing like a real-life, caring human to be a child’s first tour guide to his new human world! So all that quality time isn’t just good for bonding… it’s great for making smarter babies as well.

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