Now, I’m not a big fan of Big Medicine (which I very loosely define as “medicine as practiced by corporate and media interests” – a category which, in my mind, includes both the AMA and AAP), so I was surprised and somewhat amazed when the aforementioned AAP published a formal recommendation that NO children under 2 years of age watch television.
There is ever-increasing evidence that TV does babies and children no favors; this abstract, from the October 2007 issue of the journal Pediatrics, discusses some of the effects of TV on kids, and mentions the AAP recommendation.
Yeah, it turns out that television overstimulates baby brains and increases the risk of attention deficit disorder. That means you, too, Baby Einstein. Who knew babies were meant to spend infancy interacting directly with the people and things around them? Who would even have guessed that human interaction is the best plan for raising human babies? It’s not like it’s worked for thousands of years. (Oh, wait a minute . . . did I miss something here?)
North Americans don’t like this advice, and by and large, they don’t follow it, either. For those of you who could care less how you rot your babies’ brains (and who value above all else those precious hours of escape from child-rearing your TV affords you), here’s just the product you need:
That’s a DVD player jammed into the stroller handle. Yep, your baby doesn’t EVER need to interact with the world around her. (Or him, but if you’re relying on TV to raise your kid, you probably aren’t pushing him around in a pink stroller.)
The name of this thing is (I’m not kidding) “Baby Beehavn’ Stroller DVD Pouch”. Or, as the website puts it:
. . . next time you take your baby shopping, to a restaurant, or anywhere, the Stroller DVD Pouch is all you will need to keep your “Baby Beehavin”.
Because there’s just nothing more important than a mesmerized, semi-conscious kid.
($40, by the way, not including the DVD player.)