Larnin' Them Babies

To use the mot du jour of the blogosphere, this piece is a real thumbsucker for me, as a parent to an 18-month old: it's a Times article on the inefficacy of electronic media in helping infants and toddlers learn anything: numbers, colors, the alphabet, mix drinks. Turns out that "there is little understanding of how the new media affect young children - and almost no research to support the idea that they are educational."

Now, our baby's probably watched 60 minutes of TV over her 80 weeks of life - mostly in 15-second snippets while we find the remote and another damn Maisy book - but the article nonetheless makes me feel guilty for certain choices I've made. For instance, reading Gravity's Rainbow as her bedtime story. The profanity, violence, and coprophagia should have given me pause, but apparently the wee one can't even comprehend the concept of entropy, much less grasp the narrative structure! Oh, well. My bad.