So Smart!

Now that "landmark" studies have shown that stimulating your baby’s brain encourages intellectual development (duh), the home video market is being flooded with Baby Brain Workout videos (see the next print issue of Video Librarian for a review of Baby’s 1st Video). Divided into six segments, running five minutes each, So Smart! offers a series of geometrical shapes (ball, rectangle, square, and so on) which morph into everyday images such as flowers and faces, all the while set to a classical music soundtrack. Aimed at 3-18 month-olds, and developed by infancy researcher Alexandra Tornek, So Smart! contains one sequence which in the opinion of this viewer So Stupid!: namely, a scene with small objects (very much resembling the shapes in a Fisher-Price tool bench set) going into a person’s mouth. Of course, whether the child will see this or not is another question entirely, since young babies as a general rule will not focus on TV screens (or anything else) for long periods. (Our just-turned-one grandson watched a similar video for all of six seconds.) To be fair, the program boasts many "brainy benefits," including the fact that classical music helps babies begin to process language (now there’s a mystery: most classical music doesn’t even have words, for Beethoven’s sake). Parents who want to be on the cutting edge will surely insist on giving this a whirl; I would just recommend that they shield their offspring’s eyes during the aforementioned objects-in-mouth scene. An optional purchase. (R. Pitman)