In light of the newly discovered "Baby Einstein Scam", how much technology should we actually cut from our children's lives?

Anything in small doses is probably not going to cause harm, but it saddens me that parents keep on being barraged with media telling them that they don't know how to raise their children, and they need experts and technology and all of these devices. Children need interaction with their mothers and fathers, play time with things they can hold and touch, and love. Do we need experts to tell us this?

No, it's how children have been growing up for tens of thousands of years. All of the Baby Einstein and Leapster crap is all about companies selling useless junk by scaring parents into believing that their instincts are all wrong and that they are completely incompetent. Did anyone notice that Einstein himself never had videos to watch?

Intelligence is largely biological, and what is socialized, we know from generations of experience, comes from interaction with real life people. Yes, it is handy for kids to understand how to use technology, but babies don't need computers. Arrogant parents may believe that their two year old is going to become a super genius from some video, and that they will be reciting Shakespeare by four if they watch enough of them, but common sense and grandma's teachings haven't failed us yet, so why throw them out the window?

We know for a fact that when parents read to their children, it helps kids learn to read better than all the stupid "learning" games. We know that baby's brains are stimulated with toys they can hold far more than by images on a computer screen. We all grew up just fine without all of this garbage, and I think most people intuitively know that baby's don't need "genius" training from video tapes.It's all guilt-based, fear-based marketing that convinces people otherwise.

This criticism seems to take studies in which researchers found that watching a lot of TV is bad to draw the conclusion that watching any TV ever is bad, and that all TV is equally bad, and none of it is ever good. That's like concluding that if eating a lot of meat is bad, eating a small portion of cod is also bad. It's simply not what was studied by the research, and is not necessarily true.

On top of that, the research most likely does not examine the options the parents had, or compare like-for-like home where the only difference was in whether TV was watched or not. Maybe in the homes where children don't watch any TV, parents have a lot of time and energy available to play with kids. Maybe they have older siblings, or for all we know, nannies.

Maybe those are homes where people are wealthier, or come from a different cultural background. Maybe there just weren't a lot of homes where no TV is watched, and the families that go that way are exceptionally smart, deteremined and independent minded. Unless you factor in those kinds of things, such studies are of very limited use.My nieces and nephews watched these DVDs when they were small, and they're growing up fine.

My sisters used them to sooth the baby when they were upset, or settle them down when they couldn't sleep, or keep them entertained for a short time while mom had to do some chores. If the DVD wasn't available, it's not likely the babies would have been having wonderful learning experiences in those moments instead. Sure, if you never played with your kids but sat them in front of the TV all day, it's probably not going to be good for them.

But you knew what anyway right? Parents need to take responsibility for how they use these things, not blame Disney for making them.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.