Baby Einstein Wants You To Feel Good About TV

You might think that making millions of dollars would be enough. But the Baby Einstein Company also wants you to like them.

“While we understand and support the importance of the discussion and research on screen time for infants and toddlers, we want to ensure that you are also getting the full picture as it relates to Baby Einstein products.” (source)

You mean you aren’t making educational videos meant to be watched on a television screen? You still think you’re doing the world a favor? Sheesh.

It gets better. “While the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends ‘no screen time for infants,’ we want to reinforce the root of the recommendation which is the importance of parent-child interaction. We agree that quality together time between parent and baby is critical to the growth and happiness of any baby and our products are created as a tool for parents to use with their baby to engage and explore the world around them.” Because no-one would ever just plop their child down in front of Baby Newton. I mean, come on. That would be horrible.

I have no problem with the Baby Einstein series. Both of my children watched and enjoyed them. In theory, I figured they were a little better than some of the other nonsense out there, such as The Purple Dinosaur Who Name We Do Not Speak. Or the Teletubbies, who caused my oldest son to regress the only time he watched it. (He was walking and talking like a champ, and upon seeing Tinky Winky, Bo and their “personal cloud” and whatever the hell else was going on in Tubbyland, he started crawling and babbling baby talk. So no more Tubbies.) No, neither child was translating Goethe at the age of three. But the Baby Einstein stuff is fairly quiet and low-key, which was good enough as far as I was concerned.

But all of this “nourishing” nonsense? Please.

Young children need screen time occasionally, not because they get any benefit from it. It’s because daddy (and mummy, and grandma/grandpa, or the babysitter) has to pee and would prefer to do so alone. Once we can all be honest about this fact, we can stop the protestations and move on to more important things.

Does Baby Einstein think we’re stupid? Or are they just true believers?