With mounting pressure on students to learn complex concepts at earlier ages, parents with young children may feel compelled to accelerate learning with early education products or academic preschools, but before you run out and buy Baby Einstein DVDs or schedule an academic evaluation for your 18-month old, you might want to consider the potential effects and approach with caution.
There is much research indicating that the regular use of multimedia educational products may be counterproductive to cognitive development. This seems to be particularly true when young children are exposed to hours of television viewing, whether that exposure is to commercially prepared edutainment or developmentally inappropriate programming. Rather than enhancing intelligence, audiovisual learning programs may delay development by prematurely engaging brain cells otherwise needed for different developmental tasks. If not closely monitored, the constant overstimulation of a child may delay vocabulary and interfere with acquisition of social and attention skills.
In 2001 The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement about visual stimulation that stands today. Parents should “discourage television viewing for children younger than two years, and encourage more interactive activities that will promote proper brain development, such as talking, playing, singing, and reading together.”
That assessment is shared by many education experts who suggest that the best preschool programs provide meaningful play-based interactive programs with caring adults. Academic preschools, they argue, provide no long-term advantages, but instead make students more anxious. The drilling of reading and math at the expense of social skills at a young age may not translate into achievement in Kindergarten, and could put the child at a social disadvantage.
Those who develop and promote commercial educational products and programs often assert that children are like sponges who can easily absorb information through regular repetition, but even The Baby Einstein website, which removed claims of education advantage from its product descriptions in 2007 in response to legal action, now clearly recommends parental involvement and interaction in learning.
Diane Trautman can be reached at StudyPros In-Home Tutoring, 661-296-9206, or www.studypros.com