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Strollerderby
Working a child's executive function
The idea of IQ-boosting, brain training exercises for kids instinctively makes me cringe.
But a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that there are certain exercises that not only improve a child’s memory, but also give children a leg up in more complex thinking — in fact raising their performance on intelligence tests.
We’re not talking gimmicky Einstein videos and flash cards — here’s the classic test that psychologists use regularly and has been shown to boost one of the most important brain skills a child has:
Federal Trade Commission asked to investigate baby reading program.
Three-month-olds can’t read. It’s true! So stop feeling like you’re raising the next generation’s slackers when you see the commercials for “Your Baby Can Read,” a $200 multi-media program of flashcards with pictures, books and DVDs.
If you’ve ever seen the ads, you know that they work hard to be convincing. They start with preschool-aged kids sounding out words (hey, you’ve seen a live kid do that before!), then they show snacking toddlers reading from flashcards between cracker-bites (“Hmmm,” you tell yourself. “I guess it’s possible if I actually attempted to teach my child something.”). Finally, there’s a little, little baby, barely able to sit up on her own and idly pointing at her bellybutton. Then you notice Dad. He’s holding up a flashcard that says “bellybutton.”
Damn, that baby can read!
No, no, no, she can’t. The company that claims she can? Well, unless they can prove those babies are reading, they’ll have to stop running the ads. Continue reading »
Science-backed ideas for baby smarts
We know that blasting Mozart into your belly or plopping your little one in front of an Einstein DVD isn’t going to make Ivy League attendance more likely.
But we do know a lot about how infants learn, the kind of information they seek, and especially how their minds grow and change through our relationship with them. Of course, the objective isn’t really Harvard — when I say “smarts,” what I mean is that we want our kids to develop emotional skill, follow their interests, and learn how to focus and work hard towards something they care about.
If it sounds like a tall order for such a small person (indeed, this post is about infants, who may still be working on how to sit up or string together vowel-consonent babble) I promise it’s not. These principles aren’t of the fussy, hyper-parenting, flashcard variety. They are basic ideas about baby brain development — some of which, at the core, actually involve us taking a step back.
Here they are, from my Science of Kids column today, 7 tips for baby brain power: Continue reading »
Evelyn Einstein, granddaughter of Albert Einstein
A granddaughter of Albert Einstein, the wacky-haired theoretical physicist who discovered the theory of general relativity, says she hasn’t received a dime of the millions of dollars earned from her grandfather’s image.
Evelyn Einstein wants that to change.
She needs that to change, too. Continue reading »
Remember the whole kerfuffle over the lack of educational value in Baby Einstein videos and their subsequent recall by Disney? Well, here’s an interesting addendum to the story. Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, head of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children’s Center at Harvard, is closing the Media Center after 16 years. The Media Center is the former home of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, the advocacy group that first complained to the Federal Trade Commission back in 2006 about the false claim that Baby Einstein videos would boost your baby’s intelligence level.
No big deal… except for the fact that The Judge Baker Center pressured Poussaint, telling him he could no longer “complain that Disney was falsely marketing its popular Baby Einstein videos as educational.” The New York Times reports that the Judge Baker Center was “uncomfortable with the aggressive advocacy work” being done by Poussaint and the CCFC. This article quotes Poussaint as saying that Disney was threatening to sue Judge Baker. No wonder he got the boot. No one messes with Mickey Mouse. Continue reading »
If the 2007 University of Washington study wasn’t enough to convince parents that Baby Einstein videos don’t turn babies into little Einsteins, perhaps this one will. In what is being called the most definitive study to date of the effectiveness of educational videos for babies, researchers at the University of California at Riverside investigated the Baby Wordsworth video from the Baby Einstein series.
The video, which claims to teach babies new vocabulary words, was found to have absolutely no impact whatsoever on language acquisition. Continue reading »
The man who co-founded the “Baby Einstein” videos enterprise but no longer owns the brand is suing the University of Washington for release of records, data and research methods relating to studies on kids and television.
William Clark, who along with his wife Julie Aigner-Clark, launched the company back in 1996, said in a press release earlier this week that he asked a judge to order the university to release records of two studies that concluded young children who watch television are at a greater risk for attention problems and language delays. Continue reading »
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