Little Einsteins?

Ok, my 6-month-old daughter won't be watching any so-called "educational" DVDs when she gets a bit older.

Researchers from the University of California – Riverside followed 96 one- to two-year-old children over six weeks to see if those exposed to educational DVDs had learned anything. The children were divided into two groups with half given a DVD to watch at home over six weeks. All the children returned every two weeks for vocabulary testing.

The researchers wrote: The purpose of the study was to explore whether children between the ages of 12 and 25 months learned words from Baby Wordsworth, a commercially available DVD from the Walt Disney Company's Baby Einstein DVD series (The Baby Einstein Company, Glendale, California). The 35-minute DVD highlights 30 English labels for common objects and rooms in the house and combines short puppet skits with live footage of children and parents playing and interacting around the house.

"There was no evidence of [children] learning words highlighted in the infant-directed DVD independent of parental intervention," the researchers concluded in the study published in the current issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.