I looked back to see what I mentioned regarding “Baby Einstein” when Bush delivered his State of the Union address last January.

But the affect of priming a minute item and centering focus on it is to cover up the fact that there are no real popular policy initiatives that the president desires to force forward.  The spirit of this did come last night when Bush introduced the founder of the “Baby Einstein” company — something I would very much like to look into to see if this product placement was a kickback to the campaign contributor — Disney.

It was an arbitrary salute to the entrepreneurial spirit of America.  Maybe.

But things fall apart.

Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. “The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew,” says Christakis. “These babies scored about 10% lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos.”

Now that I think about it, this probably should have been published in the Scientific Journal “DUH!”, along with the never-ending list of studies which have made discoveries that you and I intuitively know.  Are you telling me that babies should not be staring at a television screen for long hours?  Are you telling me that babies should have regular communications and contact with with their mommy and daddy?  (Or, heck, this is a “progressive” blog — daddy and daddy; mommy and mommy.)
“I would rather babies watch ‘American Idol’ than these videos,” Christakis said, explaining that there is at least a chance their parents would watch with them — which does have developmental benefits.

So, again, why did George W Bush make it a point to mention “Baby Einstein” in his State of the Union address?  Maybe my “Disney kick-back” idea was wrong all along.  Maybe he was just giving a shout-out to those videos for aiding in his development.

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