Baby Einstein's Not So Smart After All By Alice Park

“Oral language is a skill that is acquired naturally by the young. The importance of its development in early childhood cannot be overemphasised. It underpins the whole scope of learning and is employed to question, to seek information and to proffer ideas. A child who has a well – grounded ability in oral language will usually be nicely poised to cope with reading and writing. Anyone who lacks this will be at a disadvantage.” (J.Fellowes & G.Oakley, 2010, pp4) It is a vital component of every human beings life as it is a means of communication and interaction with their family, friends and

Linebarger and Walker’s 2005 study analyzed vocabulary and expressive language in 30 month olds in relation to television viewing. They investigated whether linguistic input in the form of televised broadcasts was associated with infants’ and toddlers’ communicative ability (Linebarger and Walker 2005). Their data was collected through parent kept logs starting when the children were 6 months of age through to 30 months of age to determine television viewing habits and the relation to language. The viewing logs were coded for program, content, and intended audience (Linebarger and Walker 2005) for more reliable and informative sets of data.

I am a firm believer in the idea that everything we learn, see, touch and experience can have a lasting effect on us. For my controversy paper I will be discussing how infants develop their language or communication skills from the way their parents talk to them. While talking to a baby who may not be able to talk yet or does not even seem to be responding to you may seem silly. But it actually has a lasting effect on their language development. Even from when they are so small something as simple as talking to them can make a difference in their lives. Parents need to talk to babies as soon as possible because it can make such a difference in their development. I strongly believe and my view is for the more interaction with infants. They need it to grow and develop into the best possible version of yourself. All though infants are usually known for not speaking, they do participate in communication in their own way. They do this hearing, gazing, babbling, looking and smiling through their auditory and visual senses.A newborn infant primary way of communication is by the turn of it head when hearing sounds. The voice of the child’s mother that they remember from the womb or the caregiver would get the most responsive communicational feedback.Which is why it is essential for parents to take time to communicate with their children even if their babies. This controversy is basically how the more parents speak to their infants it seems to correlate with how much vocabulary

In the first few years of life, an infant/toddlers brain is still developing. It should not be subjected to television or computers until the brain is more developed. Through research I found that a toddler under the age of two years old cannot differentiate two dimensional images versus a three dimensional reality (2). Televisions two dimensional imaging is confusing to a child because the images are broken up (2). Better cognitive stimulation with a toddler is helping them to learn with their senses. They need to learn by touching, seeing, smelling, hearing, and tasting. If you allow your infant or toddler to watch television or play with interactive computer programs it could have negative effects on the toddlers learning abilities, such

Do babies learn from media? Parents today barely think of what the repercussions of letting their children watch long periods of television would do to them. But is watching television beneficial to their growth? Will the baby be able to absorb and retain the information placed in front of them on a screen? In the past, babies were taught through the parents, but with the emerging companies like Disney, Apple, and Baby Einstein, that entice parents, there is a new alternative. New outlets of media, such as IPads, IPhones, video games, and the internet can have impacts on the child’s development. And also older forms of media such as television.

First of all, you should start complimenting your children for their hard effort, not for their good grades. In an article, It's not about how smart you are by Carol Dwecks, it was explained by Dwecks that praising the student's effort is more efficient than praising for their intelligence, "People nearly always perform better if they focus on things they can control, such as their effort, rather than things they cannot." Because students are normally pressured to get good grades, they will begin to feel disappointment in themselves for letting their parents/guardians down when they receive a bad grade. This will lead them to overwork themselves to perform better the next time while hurting their own health. If you being to praise your children

After I watched the video I confirm my beliefs that the verbal communication during the first years of life it is important to build foundations that children can develop different skills, such as, social interaction, reading, and speaking in the future. The parents sometimes don't pay attention simple interaction at home, they want to do something more challenge, teach the letters and words as earlier as they can, because they think that if the children learn to recognize letter sooner, they will be smartest in the future.

The author makes some suggestions for improving the usage of media for infant learning. First of all, he suggested that the quality of infant-directed media should be improved to facilitate the infant learning. The commercial products could repeat content, have realistic photographic images and familiar characters to enhance visual

Children start watching television at a very young age, often before they are a year old. Packiam Alloway, Williams, Jones and Cochrane (2013) performed a study on children aged three to four years old at several British Child Care Centers to determine if what they watch on television along with reading makes a difference in the amount of vocabulary words they learn. Packiam Alloway et al. (2013) also included in their study “other key variables linked to vocabulary acquisition: short-term memory (verbal and visuo-spatial) and reading habits (fiction and educational books)" (Abstract, para 1). The team of researchers used a standard British test prior to the study and just after the study to determine if there was any difference between the groups of children with the different exposures to television.

Early language development predicts the amount of vocabulary knowledge as the child develops and is a key factor that is linked with later academic achievement (Pungello et al., 2009; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). Also, background factors must be analyzed and assessed, in order to understand how language growth differs from one child to the next. Exposure to speech is very important and helps influence early development of language and the processing speed (Fernald, Marchman, & Wielder, 2013 as cited by Weisleder & Fernald, 2009). A study done by Kwon et al., (2013), found that play has a significant effect on the language complexity for children’s language use pertaining to the structure of play or activity setting (free play), however the gender of the parent did not influence the language growth for the child. Furthermore, children are able to identify familiar words when speech is directed towards the child and not over heard, facilitated vocabulary learning at the age of 24 months (Weislder & Fernald, 2013). For example, over hearing adult conversation is not as beneficial towards the child’s vocabulary learning.

This study supported the hypothesis that infants who watch popular educational DVDs do not learn more new words than infants who do not watch the DVD (DeLoache

Educational television negatively impacts language development because it hampers vocabulary acquisition. Vocabulary acquisition is characterized by an infant’s first words and word spurt (i.e., the rapid growth in a child’s vocabulary). Zimmerman, Christakis and Meltzoff (2007) investigated the relationship between media exposure and language development in children under two years of age. 1,008 parents of children between the ages of two months and

Nearly every theory of language development recognizes that there is a critical period for learning language. During this critical period a child must receive environmental input for normal development. Parents and caregivers are an extremely important piece of this environmental input and the best way for caregivers to teach their children language is to simply talk to them—a lot. We know that children often say their first word between the ages of 11 and 14 months, and there continues to be a lot of variability in language development; is this a result of nature or nurture? Zimmerman, Christakis, and Meltzoff (2007) studied the effects of media viewing on language

It is the social and cultural aspect of language which influences a child in their development of speech and communication. According to Patricia Kuhl (2011), babies first absorb the statistics of language through watching and listening to the people around them. They hear patterns of both language and communication. Using these skills to accurately imitate speech is a baby’s first step on the communication ladder. Learning language involves learning how to communicate with the cultural group in which a child belongs. Language is developed by the values and cultural beliefs of that group.

Infants learn language through their caregivers. In the process they acquire important part of culture (Ballentine & Roberts, 2015:88). Ballentine and Roberts (2015:88) state that infants have the ability for developing language since the human voice box, tongue, and brain makes speech biologically possible. Language is the most important component of nonmaterial culture, members of the society transmit culture from generation to generation through language (Ballentine and Roberts, 2015:88). Language helps members of the society to communicate with each other and to clarify rules or norms that may be misunderstood by the members of the society (Ballentine and Roberts, 2015:88). Moreover, language makes life simple in a sense that one can interpret objects through language that may not have been understood without it and it simplify communication and interaction among members of the community (Ballentine and Roberts,