The Thoughtful Parent: December 2009

The holiday season is upon us! Many of us are spending time shuffling through store shelves looking for the perfect gift for the little ones in our lives. Many times, this gift will be some sort of toy...but which one? With literally thousands of toys on the market, how do you choose which one(s) to purchase for that special child. Although I have some training in child development, I still find it difficult to determine which toys are the most developmentally appropriate for a certain age group. Just because the manufacturer has listed the age category on the toy, doesn't always mean it really is the most ideal item for a child that age.

So I've compiled a list of great resources that will hopefully help you in choosing the best toy for the children on your shopping list. One idea that these resources emphasize (and I strongly believe in) is looking for toys that are open-ended--that is, toys that the child has to use some imagination. Some electronic toys are great but I think some toys should just be the old-fashioned kind (blocks, wagons, dolls) that don't play for the child but that the child has to create a way to play with it.

- Education.com Gift Guide--this guide provides toy suggestions that are tested by kids and teachers. The list is categorized by age and price.

- Gift ideas from Tumblon--one of my favorite websites/parent resources provided this helpful list of gift ideas categorized by age group.

- Gift ideas from Playful Learning--one of my fellow bloggers posted this great list of gift ideas. These are hands-on, well-tested gifts that encourage learning and exploration.

- eBeanstalk.com--I discovered this website a few months ago and it looks great! All the toys are tested by child development experts, including child psychologists, speech pathologists and educators.

Lastly, here's a useful article from Creative Play Plus about what to look for when choosing a developmentally appropriate toy. Great stuff!

Enjoy the holidays with all the children in your life!

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You may have heard the recent uproar about Baby Einstein's parent company, Disney, offering refunds on many of their DVDs after research has emerged that "educational" videos for infants and toddlers do live up to their claims. This comes after a growing number of research studies have shown little or no correlation between children's viewing of such videos and advances in language development. In fact, some research has shown delays in children's language development associated with viewing hours of children's videos. I blogged about this topic several months ago.

As with most research, however, the findings are not always clear cut. Many factors come into play with studies such as these. A new article in Child Development helped clarify some of the findings about children's videos and language development. Here's a quick review of the study:

- researchers studied 40 children ages 30-42 months. They compared the younger children (under 3 year of age) to the older ones (over 3 years of age)

- researchers compared two types of scenarios: (1) the child watching the video of an action word (verb) being demonstrated on-screen or (2) the child watching the video of an action word (verb) PLUS the action being demonstrated live by an adult

Here's what they found:

- children under 3 could not learn verbs from video alone but could learn them with added adult interaction

- by comparison, children over 3 were able to learn verbs from watching the video alone

Put simply, this study implies that "educational" videos meant to teach young children words (particularly verbs) are most likely not very effective for children under 3 years of age. The researchers point out that verbs are especially difficult for children to learn and so it's not surprising that it requires more adult interaction to learn them.

I found this study very helpful in clarifying why and under what circumstances videos are actually educational and when they probably are not. Instead of studying a variety of videos across different ages, this study was useful because it assessed a very specific type of language learning (i.e. verbs) by children in two different age groups. Clearly, more research is needed to help understand how and when videos may be educational for young children and when they are not. In the meantime, it's helpful to know that although your 2-year-old may enjoy those "educational" videos, they probably are not learning much from them.

Check out the press release here.

Listen to an interview with the authors here.

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