The following apology was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Tuesday 1 September 2009
William Clark, co-founder of The Baby Einstein Company, has asked us to clarify several factual points. The company was launched in 1996 not 1997. Baby Mozart was released in 1998, not 2000. Baby da Vinci was produced after Disney bought the company in 2001, not by the Clarks. With regard to 2001 turnover, Mr Clark informs us sales were $17.6m, not $25m. Mr Clark has responded further to the article in a letter.
The Baby Einstein videos accomplished great things, at least commercially. Sarah Conrad Gothie, a graduate student at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, tried to understand why. Her master's thesis, completed in 2006, is called Great Minds Start Little: Unpacking the Baby Einstein Phenomenon.
"The Baby Einstein Company began in 1997 when former teacher and new mother Julie Aigner-Clark and her husband, entrepreneur Bill Clark, produced the first video in their basement," Gothie explains. They "went on to produce Baby Shakespeare, Baby Van Gogh, Baby Da Vinci and others whose titles seem to promise visual, verbal and scientific literacy and creativity to any child who watches".
Parents snapped up the videos. In 2001, annual retail sales were $25m, and the Walt Disney Company bought the entire Baby Einstein Company. Four years later, annual sales had climbed to $200m.
Baby Einstein was itself a child of the Mozart effect, which was born in 1993 at the University of California, Irvine. That year, a study reported that college students who listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata scored slightly better than other students on a test of "visual-spatial thinking". Four years after that, a study showed improvement of "spatial-temporal reasoning skills" in some pre-schoolers who had taken half a year of private piano lessons.
Gothie says: "Although neither of these studies produced findings that could affirm a 'Mozart effect' on young children who merely 'listened' to music, non-scientific media outlets exaggerated the facts and numerous companies eagerly began producing goods reflecting a Mozart effect theme [and] referencing the 'geniuses' and musical prodigies of history."
"Baby Mozart was released in 2000," Gothie writes. "In 2006, the Mozart effect has been thoroughly and publicly debunked on a scientific basis, yet the infant market is still saturated with the products it advanced. Either consumers have not heard the news, or, more interestingly, they have chosen to ignore it."
What's in a typical baby genius video? Gothie says "close examination revealed a series of texts scarcely dissimilar to other children's video fare. No heavy pedagogical component exists in these videos. The texts themselves, despite some subtle ideological infiltration, are little more than musical puppet shows coupled with stock footage and an occasional flash of fine art."
Gothie mentions that "controversy also surrounds BabyFirstTV, the first commercial-free, 24-hour premium television network designed for babies six months to three years old". The programme now rains down from Sky TV in the UK, and from other providers in the US, France, Germany, Spain and Turkey.
Despite these mentions of "controversy", there's been mostly quiet on the subject - from educators, and also from babies. A 2007 study of infants, done by Frederick Zimmerman and colleagues at the University of Washington, in Seattle, reports that each hour per day of viewing baby DVDs/videos (eg Baby Einstein, Brainy Baby) was associated with a decrease in the babies' number of vocabulary words.