Why might the baby DVDs have a negative impact on language development in babies?
Well, first of all, we don’t know for certain that it’s causal. It may be that parents of children who have poor language development are going out and buying the baby videos to give them a leg up. To the extent that it could be causal, it might be that the baby videos are just displacing time that the child would otherwise spend with a parent or another adult caregiver, or even with an older sibling—all of whom can help the child develop language by interacting with them. That interaction could be reading books, or telling stories or just getting down on the floor and playing. Should parents stop using these products altogether? There’s a huge variation in the quality of these videos. Some of them thought about what might be helpful for a baby developmentally and they tried to design content to meet needs. With others, you can tell that they didn’t pay attention at all. So there is a real possibility that what’s on the screen is pointless if not outright harmful. You can compare it wi
