News You Can Use? III

Attention uber-parents: You can now receive refunds for all those useless "Baby Einstein" videos you bought. ("No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund") In a tacit admission that the videos may not, in fact, turn toddlers into Nobel laureates, the Disney corporation is now offering parents full refunds on Baby Einstein products purchased over the last five years.

Whatever.

We wonder if Disney isn't overreacting. After all, a baby exposed to these videos in 2004 is now, at most, 5 or 6 years old. Just because none of those children has yet entered Harvard or solved the Riemann Hypothesis doesn't mean that one of them won't. It should be noted that Einstein himself would not necessarily have been labeled a "Baby Einstein" due to the speech difficulties he suffered at an early age.

Even if your little Ignatz is currently struggling with advanced first-grade mathematics, it doesn't prove deficiencies in the "Baby Einstein" products. Conceivably, without exposure to their dubious programming, Ignatz would never have passed intermediate naptime in Kindergarten.

How do you explain to your offspring the decision to seek a Disney refund? "Sorry, Honey, these things don't work. See, you're a moron."

Personally, we are no fans of the insane school of hyperparenting that assumes you are dooming your children to a lifetime of unskilled labor if you fail to expose them to Shakespeare and Monty Python in utero. At the same time, the phrase caveat emptor comes to mind. If you're gullible enough to believe that plunking your kids down in front of the TV for hours at a time is the equivalent of just spending time with them, playing with them, reading stories to them, well then, in this case certainly, you get what you pay for.