With so many baby toys on the market, it can be difficult for parents to decide which toys are both fun and educational. Although several series of baby videos and DVDs are marketed towards improving infant cognitive development, new research finds that may not be true.

Videos May Not Provide Benefits

An interesting new study sought to investigate claims that baby videos improve cognitive and language development.  The new research concludes, however, that television is not a good medium for teaching language skills to infants.  In fact, the infants (ages 8-16 months) who watched videos had a slower rate of language acquisition.  Of the 90 infants studied, each hour per day of video viewing resulted in 6-8 fewer words learned than in infants that did not watch videos.  Most videos made specifically for babies contain very little dialog, flashy images, and short scenes, which could be part of the reason the babies did not pick up new words.   In addition, researchers theorize that infants who watch more videos in general may have less interaction with their parents. 

A Time To Learn

The first 3 years of a baby’s life includes rapid brain development. A significant amount of research states that providing your baby with educational toys can be beneficial for brain development.   An infant’s brain grows more in the first year of life than in any other, almost doubling in size, so it is important to “feed″ that growing brain with the right kind of toys.   As Best Child Toys points out, babies need to be stimulated through their 5 senses: sight, touch, smell, taste, and sound.  Playtime for infants is also learning time as playing is a baby’s primary way of learning.  Educational baby toys are focused on each stage of infant development. From increasing sensory and motor development to problem solving play, finding the right toy to suit the stage of your baby’s development can help increase your baby’s mastery of his growing skill set.

A Time To Play

Much of what your baby learns during her first year of life has to do with her interaction with you.  Your baby learns best from observing you, and as previously mentioned, the more time she spends with you the more she can learn.   Although educational baby toys may be beneficial, participating in playtime with her is even better. 

Resources for educational and eco-friendly baby toys:
Walking Stick Toys
Sum-Bo-Shine
Green Toys

Tags: videos

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Baby Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.