By Eric Goldscheider ’93G

In a nondescript professional building in Springfield, small people give researchers big ideas about how so-called baby videos influence intellectual and emotional growth. The project is one of hundreds that psychology professor Daniel R. Anderson has conducted in his career. For more than 35 years he has been looking at how television affects kids. Lately he has been investigating whether content aimed at infants and toddlers—kids less than two years of age—delivers on its claims.

Recently, 20-month-old Mackenzie Berke-Spaulding and her mother, Alissa, arrived for a session. Graduate student Lindsay Demers greeted them and led them to a room, the most prominent feature of which is a four-by-five-foot plate of one-way glass. The room was furnished with a rug, a comfortable chair, a coffee table with a variety of magazines, low shelves holding an assortment of toys, and a television. Demers controlled the television from another room beyond the one-way mirror. She also wielded a video camera that recorded everything the mother-and-daughter pair, one of 225 parent-child dyads enrolled in the study, did for 45 minutes.

For the first half hour a Sesame Beginnings video played on the television. Baby versions of Sesame Street puppets Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and Elmo performed in fanciful vignettes, interspersed with footage of real parents and children playing games that revolve around reading, music, and discovery. Demers was interested in how often little Mackenzie and her mom looked at the screen, whether the magazines and toys held more appeal for them than the television, and, most important, what kinds of interactions the mother and daughter engaged in. McKenzie seemed more interested in the toys than the screen.

Others in the study will experience the exact same conditions, except the screen in the background will show content produced by Baby Einstein, one of several companies making movies for the zero- to 24-month-old set. The promotional materials claim the videos increase baby attention spans, instill a love of music, and calm grumpy kids.

Tim and Jennifer Malanowski of Chicopee participated in the study with their twins McKenna (a girl) and McKallum (a boy), last February when the children were 19 months old. “We signed up because I’m an educator, and I was curious about the Baby Einstein series,” said Jennifer Malankowski, a former sixth-grade teacher who has been running a home daycare since giving birth. She received the complete set of 18 Baby Einstein DVDs as a hand-me-down and says her children enjoy them, especially during long car trips. Her daughter is “more of a listener” while her son is “more of a transfixed watcher,” she said. It has been interesting to see the difference in the way her two children have responded to the videos in the study, she said. “There is a lot of publicity out there about not putting your kid in front of a TV,” said Malanowski. “In some ways I agree, but I think it’s okay as long as you are interacting with them.”

Opposing the marketing of such videos are organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends that children under two years not watch any television. A group called the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood sued the video manufacturers, alleging false advertising. But none of this seems to dampen demand, with sales estimated in the billion-dollar range. “When we are exposing a large portion of our future generation to an influence that has such debatable merits, then it is important to study both whether children are getting anything out of these videos and whether they are having any positive or negative effects on the babies,” according to Anderson.

Parents of all the children in this study kept a two-week television diary in addition to coming in for two controlled-observation sessions. In the diary they marked down when the child was in a room with the TV on, what was on the screen, and who else was in the room. A third of the families received Baby Einstein videos at the outset, a third Sesame Beginnings, and a third no videos.

Erin Tassinari ’97 and her 15-month-old son, Jack, were part of the study. She received two Baby Einstein videos for her baby shower, but so far Jack hasn’t shown much interest in them. “He loves books, and if we can encourage that, it’s probably a better thing,” said Tassinari, who lives in Wilbraham. She responded to the letter inviting them to join the study because seeing her nieces’ reactions to the fast-paced shows they regularly watch made her curious about what might lie in store for her children. Filling out the diary didn’t take long because there wasn’t much to report, said Tassinari, who graduated from UMass Amherst with a degree in psychology and elementary education but opted for a career in pharmaceutical sales. “I’m sure that over the course of his life Jack will watch a lot of TV,” said Tassinari, so she is in no hurry to get him started now.

The recordings Demers made from the observation room will be coded. A number correlating to the observed child-parent interaction is assigned to each 10-second interval. That will amount to more than a 100,000 data points that she and Anderson’s other students will crunch into tables and graphs. The National Science Foundation and the Sesame Workshop are footing the bill for this and related research to the tune of more than $800,000.

Anderson’s career is associated with heralding the benefits of educational programming. He has consulted on a variety of productions, including Sesame Street and Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues and Dora the Explorer, in some instances helping to shape content. He has been involved in large longitudinal studies tracking children as they grow into adolescence to assess and measure the benefi ts of television. He said quality programming has positive effects in terms of interest in reading and academic achievement. Among his many other activities, he is a member of the Better Business Bureau’s Children’s Advertising Review Unit.

Given the financial and possible health implications of the brisk sales in what was until recently regarded as an untapped market for baby videos, industry executives as well as parent and medical groups are anxious to know what Anderson thinks of the spate of content aimed at the youngest children. So far he is not impressed. “Parents really like baby videos and they are overwhelmingly convinced that they are positive for their children,” said Anderson, but “when we ask them what they think their children are learning, that actually stops them. They say, ‘Well, you know it’s called Baby Einstein, isn’t it?’ or ‘It’s called Baby Genius, it must be doing something good.’”

Anderson doesn’t think the programs are necessarily bad, it’s just that we don’t yet know enough to say one way or the other. The early research indicates that television is lost on small children. The question inevitably arises, how can we tell?

Over the years Anderson has designed complex experiments to ferret data out of preverbal children. These include measuring responses to real-life situations behind an opening that mimics a television screen or having people talk to children from a screen mimicking what would otherwise be a live interaction. “The surprising result that we found, and other people have found, is that two-year-olds and younger kids learn much less from the video,” said Anderson. “In some cases they show no evidence of learning at all, even though they show evidence from learning in the real situation.”

Other questions come into the mix when evaluating baby videos: Do they provide parents a guilt-free excuse to ignore their children for longer periods of time, and are there costs in terms of lost human interaction associated with that? Looked at another way, could there be benefits to having innocuous content on screens since in many homes the TV is constantly on anyway? A question central to the research Demers is assisting with is whether the videos model positive parent-child interactions that the adult viewers might replicate?

“I think it is possible that someone could design very effective baby videos in terms of teaching babies things that might be of value to them,” said Anderson. He simply hasn’t seen them yet. ◆

Family in Literature

Samuel Richardson’s tragic masterpiece Clarissa, published in the middle of the 18th century, represents a model of the dysfunctional family. Twentyfirst-century readers, at least in Western cultures, have a hard time predicament; even in the 18th century, this kind of forced marriage would have been the exception rather than the rule. But readers can certainly empathize with Clarissa when she repeatedly asks why her family cannot behave like a family. She begins with an idealized conception of the family, only to encounter its exact opposite in the conduct of those closest to her. We live in an age in which politicians, religious leaders, and moralists of all stripes trumpet “family values,” yet we regularly learn of abuse, neglect, and violence within families—including those of some of the loudest advocates for the family. The greed behind the Harlowes’ willing sacrifi ce of their daughter may seem cartoonish, yet contemporary culture often celebrates a materialism that can stand in the way of establishing and nurturing strong family relationships. — Professor Joseph F. Bartolomeo, Chair of the English Department