Vindicated by refund offer

They were surprised that I refused to turn on an hour-long episode of Sesame Street when the kids had the flu. And they were offended when I wouldn’t pop a newly-presented Baby Einstein DVD in front of the baby’s high chair while I prepared dinner. Educated friends tried very hard to convince me it would help baby’s vocabulary.

Not so, admitted The Walt Disney Co. this week. Its subsidiary, the company that produces Baby Einstein products, announced on Oct. 23 that it will provide full refunds to anyone in the United States and Canada who purchased the brand’s DVDs between 2004 and 2009.

As it turns out, the DVDs don’t make your kids smarter. In fact, they may even dull their senses to the point where they have a negative effect on brain development.

I’ve had my suspicions for years. Baby Einstein is like A Clockwork Orange, on LSD, for kids. There’s no violence or nudity. But there’s also no storyline to accompany rapidly changing and disconnected pictures. The classical music accompaniment sounds like it was produced on a cell phone keypad.

The refund announcement came three years after a Boston-based lobby group filed a complaint to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood claimed The Baby Einstein Company was misleading consumers by marketing the DVDs as educational.

At one time, the Baby Einstein Company claimed the videos would help children under the age of two acquire language skills, a fact that has been frequently disputed by development and language specialists.

Many, including those at the CCFC, say the DVDs are the antithesis to good education.

One psychologist recently compared sitting a child in front of a Baby Einstein DVD to dangling a piece of string in front of his face all day long.

There is widespread consensus among child psychologists that, above all, babies need interaction. Language development, in particular, is encouraged through the senses. A baby that can see his mother’s mouth move, hear her words clearly, even feel her breath on his hand or cheek gets a leg up when learning to speak. Voice-overs on a DVD stimulate none of these senses.

The Baby Einstein Company removed educational claims attached to the DVDs in May 2006, after the initial claim was filed.

This week’s refund announcement is a loud and clear admission that Baby Einstein will not turn your children into Mensa kids. It’s sad for parents who bought into the indisputably effective marketing of the products. It’s vindication for those of us who have held out for all these years, in spite of the niggling voice in the back of our heads saying, “Don’t you want your children to be as smart as the Jones’ kids?”