When Tracy McCallin heard in a 2009 lecture on language development in young children that Walt Disney Company was offering refunds on the purchase of its Baby Einstein series, she wondered why. Could it be that videos like “Baby Shakespeare” and “Baby Galileo” were not setting the pre-toddler crowd plopped in front of them on the fast track to Mensa?

While this seemed like a no-brainer, the Hopkins Children’s pediatrician sought the evidence, and reviewed published literature on the effect of early TV on infants’ development and language.

Founded in 1997, Baby Einstein was conceived as a media product line for infants and toddlers. Its target audience, of course, was the older set – purchasing adults. Walt Disney bought Baby Einstein in 2001. In 2006, it dropped mention of “educational” on all Einstein products, a nod perhaps to the notion that TV viewing, in any guise or format, may not teach babies much of anything.

The literature, says McCallin, seems to support this notion. A 2009 study in Pediatrics, she says, shows no intellectual acceleration in 3-year-olds who watched TV and “educational” programming in infancy and toddlerhood. In a study of babies 8-16 months-old, TV viewing was associated with poor language development. Other studies attributed poor sleep,obesity and attention problems in young children to their TV viewing habits. Certainly the American Academy of Pediatrics has long discouraged the practice of allowing young children to watch TV, citing both its disadvantages for them and the misapprehension of their caretakers that the practice is either educational or benign.  

“There is no evidence of cognitive benefit in watching TV in the first two years of life,” said McCallin, a   second-year pediatric resident, at a recent Grand Rounds presentation on the subject at Johns Hopkins. “The only correlations seem to be neutral or negative ones.”

The greatest cognitive, linguistic and social advantages for very young children lie instead, McCallin affirmed, in play and in being read and talked to, not in gazing at the boob-tube. Therein lies the genius.