When I was pregnant with my daughter Lucie I saw a report in a pregancy magazine that said a study showed that if I eat fish high in Omega 3 fatty acids, my baby will sleep better. Sounded a little hard to believe, so I did my research and found the study only had 40 women in it. Hardly good science.

So I was suspicious when I read in the Denver Post that in a study published in the Journal of Pediatrics, researchers found that, among babies ages 8 months to 16 months, every hour spent daily watching programs such as Brainy Baby or Baby Einsteintranslated into six to eight fewer words in their vocabularies as compared with other children their age.

I found the study (and the one the researchers did before that). I also found that one of the researchers, Dimitri A. Christakis, MD, has a bias in trying to blame TV for ADD/ADHD. For years he has been saying that watching videos like Baby Einstein affects language development, too. That may be his opinion but it doesn't play out when researchers couldn't find any correlation between media exposure and vocabulary in toddlers and didn't test for exposure to Baby Einstein just TV viewing in general.

Also, we all know how the media loves to blame mothers for sitting our kids in front of the TV like zombies so we can actually take a shower or maybe cook a meal. Wow, how awful and how dare we expose our children to such harm! Please.

To read more about the studies, what Disney has to say, Dr. Christakis's interviews, etc. visit A Mama's Rant and read The Real Scoop on Watching Baby Einstein (just because you have a Dr. in front of your name doesn't mean you're right).