’Limited benefit’ to educational DVDs
Parents working from home would not advance their child's vocabulary further if they bought educational DVDs for their toddlers, a study has suggested.
The 100 one and two-year-olds surveyed did not have their vocabulary boosted by regular preschool sessions of watching a DVD from Disney's Baby Einstein range, the study found.
On the contrary, the younger the children were when they started routinely watching the DVDs, the more their word range declined.
Researchers at the University of California tested the children over six weeks and instructed the parents of half the toddlers to play a Baby Wordsworth programme 15 times over the testing period.
The other toddlers' parents were told to continue life as normal.
The study found older children picked up words better than younger ones, but those who watched the DVD did no better than the others. Some appeared to learn little or nothing, the researchers reported in American journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
Watching TV could mean toddlers are missing out on playing with parents who are working from home or with other children and toys.
