You Mean, Sedating My Baby With Television Won't Make Her A Genius?

Okay, so I know I'm a week late to the party, but whatever. As far as I am concerned, the biggest dog-bites-man story of the last few weeks is the shocking (shocking!) revelation that watching Baby Einstein videos don't make your child smarter. In fact, they appear to make your child dumber than watching no TV at all.

For a laugh before we dive into the guts of it, here's The Onion's take.

So, I cannot really find words to explain how big a surprise this news is not to me. It seems completely, entirely, absolutely absurd to me to think that watching some characters prancing around on the TV can actually make children smarter. Yes, it's entirely possible that you can learn some math or some Spanish by watching Sesame Street, but hopefully everyone understands that there's a big difference between knowing things and being smart. Being smart is being able to apply the things you know to everyday situations.

I am a big believer in a concept that I, rather vaguely, call 'evolutionary burden.' The best book I've yet seen which discusses it in detail is called The Continuum Concept. In my opinion, anyone who has, or is thinking of having, kids ought to read this book. I don't want to get too deep into it, but briefly put, the thesis of the book is that human beings evolved to 'expect' a particular set of circumstances based on the conditions we experienced during our evolutionary time as humans, the last 200,000 years or so.

These expectations are entirely subconcious, but no less real for that. We see them in the cry of a baby left alone in her crib for the first time (or the second, or sometimes the tenth.) Evolutionarily, that simply would never happen. A baby would be with her mother nonstop, 24/7, for the first two or so years of her life. Finding herself alone would probably mean Mom suffered some sort of awful mishap, and crying was shaped, by natural selection, to alert other members of the tribe to the imminent danger.

Anyhow, the general idea of the evolutionary burden is that we are shaped, body and mind, by the forces of natural selection to thrive in conditions which are similar to those we experienced over the last 200,000 years or so. It's why I eat the way I do (an attempts to simulate the hunter-gatherer diet using modern foods), why I have my beliefs about community and how the feeling of belonging is necessary to happiness, and other wacky beliefs I hold.

Needless to say, we have not evolved to be used to the experience of television. Humans evolved to learn about the world around them in small, protected doses, experienced by being carried around by mother as she goes about her daily tasks. Historically, there was no such thing as child-specific entertainment. In many hunter-gatherer societies, mothers don't even talk to their babies, the babies pick up language by listening to the grownups around them.

It doesn't surprise me at all to find that a baby is entirely overstimulated by the bright lights and wacky sounds of children's TV shows. That's simply more sensory input than they have evolved to be able to handle well. Hell, my friends Drew and Daisy, who have quite a lot more mental complexity than a 6-month-old, are completely absorbed by bright lights on TV sometimes. I would absolutely not expect that this drives babies' brains to develop quicker or more strongly. In fact, I would suspect that they might be driven in the opposite direction, developing more slowly and feebly, especially during the early years when so many brain connections are being made and developed.

Gregg Easterbrook, best known as ESPN.com's Tuesday Morning Quarterback, is also a leading advocate for the proposition that TV, not vaccines, is a major causal factor in the ongoing rise of autism in American children. I am very predisposed to this argument, which I know means I have to take all the evidence I see with a grain of salt, but I found this article, from last October, quite convincing as a first step in making this case.

Anyhow, it certainly remains to be seen whether or not TV is actually harmful in childhood development. For the moment, I am concerned but not panicked about it. But any claim that it can be especially helpful would have to be backed up by a heck of a lot of scientific evidence before I would find it convincing.