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Baby watching Baby Einstein Show on TVI am so against kids being glued to a TV set. Yes, that’s a quiet time for mom and God knows I could use some of it, but that doesn’t make it all right for the kid to be watching cartoons or whatever for hours. I didn’t really believe that watching silly kiddie TV shows can do anything for their development, until I saw the Baby Einstein collection.

Being very skeptical about it, I would never have bought those DVDs but luckily Rob’s cousin gave us hers because her kid was outgrowing them and she knew how good they were. It was the most thoughtful present ever.

My son has been watching them ever since he was 11 months old and has been listening to the classical music from those DVDs since birth. I’m not kidding, we have a little MP3 player with a speaker and every time we took a stroll in pram I would turn it on. People in the street sometimes would give me strange looks (can’t blame them, we did sound like an ice-cream truck) but that didn’t put me off, because there is much evidence that classical music promotes infants’ development.

There are 20 DVDs, some have music and most have videos. He can watch any of them for hours (if it wasn’t for his mean mother who only allows 45 minutes at a time). Luckily most of the videos are 30 minutes long, so when it’s over he leaves without a fight :) Each of the DVDs has a target age – infants, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 12 months etc up to 3 year-olds but honestly – Eric is 18 months now and he likes almost all of them.

The variety of topics is amazing, for example there is a “Baby Macdonald“, which is a show about a farm, animals on a farm, the fresh produce, the fields, the tractors etc. There are bits where they show kids playing in the studio, planting and watering and my son looks so interested watching them (in general, he likes watching kids his own age). There are puppet shows and one look at the puppets is enough to make him laugh in anticipation of the little scenes they play.

Other DVDs are teaching the kids about their neighborhood – the playground, the ice-cream shop, the bank (Baby’s favorite places), introducing them to world’s animals, demonstrating the 4 seasons with beautiful paintings of the Impressionists, etc.

I can see what watching those DVDs does for my kid. He started to notice airplanes after he’s seen on in “On The Go” DVD and he started to eat corn after he’s seen a boy eating corn in “Baby Macdonald”. Those are just two of many examples of things he learned through that collection of videos.

The only thing I don’t like about this series is that the puppets are a bit confusing; it’s hard to understand “who is who”. So sometimes I want to ask Eric something about the puppets and don’t quite know what to call them. A horse looks like a lion and a giraffe looks like a zebra. But seriously, that’s the only thing I could complain about – otherwise “Baby Einstein’s” are great.

What is your kid’s favorite show? What DVDs do they like and why? How long do you let them watch their cartoons?