Can Babies Learn from Ms. Rachel and Other Baby TV Shows?
Ms. Rachel has become a household name for nearly every parent with a baby or toddler. Her YouTube channel, Songs for Littles- Toddler Learning Videos, has over 2.6 million subscribers and her videos have hundreds of millions of views. The woman behind the Ms. Rachel is Rachel Griffin Accurso, a preschool teacher and mother living in New York City. Her husband is a Broadway composer who helps to produce her YouTube channel. As she explained in a recent interview on the Today Show, she started the YouTube channel because her son did not speak his first word until nearly 3 years old and she could not find a television show that targeted language development to help him.
Her website claims that her videos help “children learn to talk, learn letters, numbers, colors, animal sounds and more." On her website, she also states that her team works with speech language pathologists to “provide speech practice techniques on video for toddlers!” and she has a quote from a speech language pathologist saying that she uses “all of the right techniques.”
Ms. Rachel isn’t alone in creating “educational” shows for babies on YouTube. Little Baby Bum has 40.6 million subscribers and claims to “support cognitive development” in its show description. A similar channel called Super Simple Songs has 37 million subscribers and is described as being “created by a team of educators.” Hey Sensory Bear has 1.48 million subscribers and seems geared towards very young babies, as it features black-and-white and contrasting colors which are known to hold the attention of newborns.
So is the marketing on these shows accurate? Can babies actually learn from a television show?
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Dr. Cara Goodwin, PhD, is a child psychologist and mother to three children who "translates" research on parenting and child development into information that is accurate, relevant, and useful to parents.
