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IN the best-selling "Baby Einstein Language Nursery" DVD, images of colorful toys and bold patterns dance across the screen over a soundtrack of stimulating music and words spoken in seven languages.
The video is part of a growing industry aimed at parents who want their babies to excel intellectually from the very start.
But those parents might actually be better off if their kids didn't watch any videos at all.
According to a recent study, the more baby videos a young child watched, the more slowly his or her language developed.
Published in August 2007, the study triggered an ongoing debate between its authors at the University of Washington and The Walt Disney Co, owner of the Baby Einstein brand.
Other researchers, meanwhile, are still arguing about how powerful and long-lasting the effects of video-watching are on babies, though there is general agreement that parents are better off interacting with their children than planting them in front of the television.
"Those (parents) who use DVDs as baby sitters are hardly ever successful (in parenting)," said Dr Victor Strasburger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico.
The study, which appeared in The Journal of Pediatrics, was based on telephone interviews of 1,008 parents and a test known as the Communicative Development Inventory, a standard measurement of language development in children eight to 16 months old.
The parents were asked to report their children's typical amount of video exposure in each of six content media types, such as children's movies, television and baby videos.
To measure their babies' language abilities, the parents were also given a list of 80 simple words and asked how many their children could speak.
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