Half an hour before bedtime, John Hill-Edgar is in his blue bouncy chair, watching the Baby Bach DVD, riveted by the sound of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring and the pictures of a toy train, a baby, a bubble-blowing toy bear.
He is just seven months old and not talking yet, but, like many other 21st-century American babies, he has been watching videos from the Baby Einstein series almost since birth.
In the last five years, there has been an explosion in electronic media for babies and toddlers: Teletubbies, the first television show for pre-verbal children; computer "lapware" for babies to play with while sitting in a parent's lap; and hundreds upon hundreds of videotapes and DVDs for even the tiniest infants.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Many babies are now immersed in electronic media for hours every day. In fact, more than a quarter of children under two have a television in their own room, according to a large-scale study of young children's media habits, issued earlier this week by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
On a typical day, the study found, 59 percent of children six months to two years watch television, and 42 percent watch a video or a DVD. The median time they spend watching some form or another on the screen is slightly more than two hours.
"The last time we did a big study on kids and media, about five years ago, we didn't think to go younger than two, because we didn't think there was anything there," said the study's lead author, Vicky Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser Foundation. "But that's really changed. And based on what we've now found with the six-month- to two-year-olds, if we do this kind of study again, we'd probably go down to birth."
According to the study, 10 percent of the babies and toddlers from six months to two years have a television remote control designed for children. And 32 percent have videos from the Baby Einstein series, created eight years ago as a way of exposing infants to poetry, language, music and art. Baby Einstein is now a Disney line that includes books, flashcards, puppets and DVDs whose titles have expanded to include Baby Shakespeare, Baby Galileo, Baby Newton and Baby Neptune, among others.
This is no surprise to baby John's mother, Dr. Allison Hill-Edgar, who received her first Baby Einstein video when she was pregnant with her older son, Morgan.
Morgan, now two, has already developed distinct video preferences. "No, Mommy," he said as his mother put on Baby Bach in their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. "No Baby Bach. I want Mose-art. Mose-art, Mommy! Mose-art."
After a hundred viewings, though, the Baby Mozart DVD has worn out, so on this night it was just Baby Bach and Baby Van Gogh. Morgan talks to his mother as he watches, heralding each new appearance on the screen. "Sky!" he exclaims, "Trees."
"We don't watch every day and it's something we do together and talk about, so I really don't worry that it stifles their creativity or anything," said Hill-Edgar, who is doing her residency in internal medicine. "We probably have about 20 kid tapes. And sometimes, if I'm at the computer, Morgan will sit on my lap and look at this Keith Haring Web site he likes."
There is little consensus about precisely how electronic media affect young children, and little data on which to base any conclusions.
"We know the first two years are a crucial developmental period, but at this point we don't have a clue about the impact of all this media," Rideout said. "The Nielsen ratings don't even count kids under two, so there's no commercial ratings available. We're hoping this study provides some base-line data."
The Kaiser study was based on a nationally representative telephone survey conducted last spring among 1,065 parents with children six months to six years old. The study, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, found that more than a third of all such children had a television in their bedroom and that those who did spent more time watching than those who did not.
According to the parents' own reports, more than a third live in homes where the television is on almost all the time, even if no one is watching. And children in such homes are much less likely than others to be able to read at ages four to six, though the authors emphasized that the relationship was not necessarily causal.
But it is among the babies and toddlers that the most startling picture emerges.
"We've got a mom in the office whose two-year-old daughter has a special computer table, and she's got her games and her activities and her bookmarked Web sites," Rideout said. "It's a new phenomenon to have little kids spend this kind of time with the media, and while we don't know what it does, I think there are some red flags."
The baby-media blitz began in the late 1990s, on the heels of a flurry of publicity about how the earliest years were the most important for a child's brain development.
There was so much discussion of the "Mozart effect" -- the idea that exposure to classical music made a person smarter -- that Zell Miller, then the governor of Georgia, proposed that the state give a classical CD to every new mother leaving the hospital.
Capitalizing on parental
anxieties, many of the new tapes and DVDs are marketed as educational aids, with titles like Brainy Baby -- Right Brain, Bee Smart Baby Multilingual Vocabulary Builder, Baby Genius -- Mozart and Friends and Baby Laureate's for the Love of Art. Baby Einstein features nursery rhymes and counting in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Hebrew, Japanese and Russian and explains in the guide to parents that "research has shown that infants have a natural ability to distinguish and assimilate the sounds of all languages, but that this ability fades as babies grow older."
Alma Schneider of New Jersey, who got the videotape as a gift when her daughter, Ilah Saltzman, was just a few days old, said, "You want to make sure you're doing everything you can for your child and you know everyone else uses Baby Einstein, so you feel guilty if you don't."
Now Ilah is three, and her younger brother, Levi, just had his first birthday. Schneider currently has three Baby Einstein tapes, some Baby Einstein flashcards, a Teletubbies tape -- and guilt of a different sort.
"I know you're supposed to watch with the kids, but little by little you stop doing that and use them as a baby sitter," she said. "I don't know anybody who really sits there."
In 1999, the year after Teletubbies, a British import, arrived on US television, the American Academy of Pediatrics adopted a statement that children under two should not watch television and that children of all ages should not have a television in their room.
"Maybe it should be phrased more positively, that children do best with the maximum free play, the maximum interaction and maximum face time with their parents," said Dr. Michael Rich, a member of the academy's committee on public education, who is also director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Harvard. "That's what we know. We don't know the difference between kids raised on media and those raised on more interactive play -- and I don't think we'll ever have that data."
Other experts say the academy's recommendation should help parents resist the media marketing.
"I think the academy was trying to help parents understand that in the very early years of life, what babies and toddlers need most is adults," said Matthew Melmed, executive director of Zero to Three, a national center for infants, toddlers and families. "We're programmed, as human beings, to learn through interpersonal relationships."
Many parents say that they understand that large doses of television are not good for babies and toddlers, and that in any case it is better to watch with them. But as a real-world matter, they say, the only time they put the DVD in is when they need a respite from child care.
"It's like a treat for Eli," said Joanna Grand from Massachusetts, whose nine-month old son is allowed to watch Baby Mozart, which he got as a baby present, only about once a week. "He gets very quiet, and he can't take his eyes off it, so it gives us a little time to make dinner. My husband hates the idea of it. He sees the baby staring at the TV like that, and it freaks him out."
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