Working Parents: Can TV be good for babies?

A favorite Business Week writer James Mehring on the Working Parent's Blog wrote a piece "Watch and Learn" and asked "Can TV be good for babies?"

An excerpt of my reply:

TV should never be a substitute or proxy for human interaction, and whenever possible, kids should be spending as much time as they can with their family.

However, watching high-quality programming with adults in an interactive way can make TV a social experience rather than an isolating one... Most developmental psychologists recommend kids shouldn't just sit there alone zoning out in front of TV, but should have adult accompaniment and encouragement.

Thankfully, programming for young children has come a long way from the violent cartoons when we were kids.... So a group of like-minded parents at Cuvid.com have set out to create the most meaningful, highest-quality developmental baby videos possible.

You can also read my full comments.

Emotional Development: When is mommy mad?

The short answer is, it depends how old your baby is.

SCIENCE: A recent BYU study published in Developmental Psychology showed that kids as young as 4-months old can recognize different emotions when facial expression and voice matched. However, babies can't recognize emotion in voice alone until 5 months and not in facial expression alone until 7 months.
Toddler: Mommy is mad!
Development: The subtle but important take-home message of this study is your baby might not get the subtle facial clues of your feelings until they reach a critical developmental milestone. It is also another example that the simultaneous pairing of stimuli (in this case, voice and facial expressions) is a critical mechanism of infant development. So while babies can recognize /who/ we are within minutes of being born, it takes them a while to be able to understand when we frown when they spill their bottle or when we grin because they're so darn cute.

You can also read my other blog on Child Development to see how this BYU study supports Cuvid's Developmental Videos.

Now if I can just find a way to get Dr. Flom to use Cuvid videos in one of his studies... hmm....