It’s hard to avoid logging screen time of some kind on a daily basis, and that’s true even in young children. Babies in the U.S. start watching TV early on, with educational DVDs and television shows designed to encourage early language development in pre-preschoolers.
The question is, Do instructional DVDs actually help babies learn? To find out, researchers at the University of California at Riverside designed the most definitive study of the issue to date. The study used a DVD called Baby Wordsworth , which is aimed at teaching babies new vocabulary words, and assigned a group of 12-to-24-month-olds to watch it daily for six weeks. Turns out, the videos didn’t work. There was no difference in language acquisition between children who were assigned to watch the DVD and a control group.
