Will it never end? This morning’s New York Times brings news of the latest salvo in the long-running battle between the co-founders of the popular Baby Einstein series, William Clark and Julie Aigner-Clark, and the University of Washington. The Clarks are now suing the UW for records related to two studies in 2004 and 2007, where researchers Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis seemed to confirm that, as SunBreak photo editor James Callan put it in Seattlest at the time, the videos were nothing more than “21st century snake oil,” with no demonstrable educational impact on children–while subjecting them to the potentially harmful effects of TV.
The Clarks sold Baby Einstein to the Walt Disney Company back in 2001, and at one point the brand was generating $200 million in sales and controlled 90 percent of the booming baby edutainment market. The problem was that for years, pediatricians had been discouraging parents from letting infants watch any television, to the point that in 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a formal recommendation that children under the age of two (Baby Einstein‘s target market) shouldn’t be watching any television.
Eventually, an FTC complaint about false and misleading advertising–for claiming that the products were educational at all—led Disney last fall to offer refunds for any copies bought between 2004 and 2009. The Clarks no longer have a financial interest in the company, but they’re continuing the fight on principle.
“I’m proud of what I made,” Julie Aigner-Clark told the Times. “Welcome to the 21st century. Most people have televisions in their houses, and most babies are exposed to it. And most people would agree that a child is better off listening to Beethoven while watching images of a puppet than seeing any reality show that I can think of.”
She’s got a point about TV in the home, but the latter part is, unfortunately, just plain wrong. It’s primarily the parents who are seeing the difference between Baby Einstein and Jersey Shore, not the six-month-old. The success of infant edutainment rests on convincing parents they’re doing something good for their kids when, as AAP wrote in a letter of support for the FTC complaint (PDF), “parents play the videos to give themselves some time to do other household chores, like cooking dinner or doing laundry.”