Health aNd Fitness Guide

A DVD or a video game may not be the best method to keep your child amused. A study published in the Journal of Paediatrics shows that, for every hour a day infants between eight and 16 months spent watching baby DVDs and videos that claim to enhance linguistic abilities, they understood an average of six to eight fewer words compared to infants who did not watch them. “There are a fixed number of hours that babies are awake and alert. If the ‘alert time’ is spent watching DVDs and TV instead of with people speaking in ‘parantese’, they are not getting the same linguistic experience,” said Andrew Meltzoff, co-author, and co-director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.