Baby Einstein is an educational video made by a US company which has tiny babies in their commercial sights.
The company's first video for children aged from one month to 18 months consists of bright patterns, circles, and parallel lines, and short filmed sequences of puppets, moving toys and mobiles.
The accompanying sound track includes music from Mozart and Bach, poetry from Yeats and Wordsworth, nursery rhymes, the alphabet, and the numbers one to 20 read out in six languages - English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Russian and Hebrew.
The company claims that repeated sound patterns to different languages will 'help form dedicated connections in the brain's auditory cortex, creating greater brain capacity.'
Baby Einstein is just another canon in the early education arsenal which includes mobiles in the cot and toys being renamed as early learning activity centres.
Interest in how children learn has been increasing over the past decade. Everything from breast milk versus formula to how tightly a nappy is secured has now been studied for its effect on the development of those little grey cells.
It can add up to pressure on parents. The phrase 'hot housing the kids' has been coined to describe the kind of frantic activity that some parents engage in, ferrying offspring from swimming to drama, gym to ballet in an effort to get their darling ahead of the toddler posse.
Conflicting views
Caroline and Maurice White have two children Lloyd aged eight, and Zach aged four and a half months.
Still on maternity leave from her job in personnel management, Caroline has strong yet conflicting views on improving her baby's brain power through plonking him down in front of an educational video.
"The first feeling is that babies seem to be born more alert these days than they used to be. Zach has his eyes wide open, sometimes sleeps very little during the day, and is up for whatever is going on.
"He seems to need me to talk a lot to him, and I am been looking for toys and equipment that will interest and stimulate him,'' she says.
"But I've also had this bizarre notion of rows of babies sitting in front of the television and being programmed by what they see on screen. What messages are being given?
"How will they affect personality, what kind of input is going on, and what long-term effect would it have that we might not know about until our children are much older? That's a really scary scenario!"
So much fun already
Caroline is not in favour of hot-housing her children.
"I think school is where our children learn academically, and home is where they learn about life," she says.
"If your children are looking at too much television, I think they are losing out. Zach is already so much fun to chat to and interact with, I put him down in his chair on the worktop and yap away with him.
"He's learning about language, about facial expression, about moods, and how he is part of something else.
"Television is mutually exclusive, it's just child and screen, they don't talk to talk to each other much when they're looking at television, so it's a pale imitation of the human relationship.
"You don't have a long time to be the only influence on your child, and other influences come in very quickly now, anyway.
"I also feel if you begin hot housing the kids too much, you're giving a very clear message about the value you put on them in terms of succeeding, and perhaps putting that demand on them, rather than giving them a value as a great little person just as they are."'
Not that television is banned in the White household. If anything, Caroline says it can be turned on and stay on regardless, as a general background to family life.
"One of the problems with that approach is that you can leave them looking at something and you come in later and find them looking at something quite different.
"On the other hand, I think our children need to see television as a tool and a channel of learning, and it has a value in that. I find that when I sit down with them and we look at a programme together it gives it a value.
"Before Zach was born, Rugrats was introducing a new character, and there was a lot about the confusion and feelings of a new baby in the house, and some of the rivalry and jealousy that went with that.
"I was able to ask Lloyd how he felt about having a new baby brother or sister. The programme did facilitate a really good chat."
Baby Einstein has taken America by storm, and its makers feel they have hit on a winning formula.
At age 12 months babies can graduate to Baby Shakespeare which includes lines from A Midsummer Night's Dream. The company's next release will be Baby Van Gogh.
Reamonn O'Donnchadha is a school principal, psychotherapist and author of The Confident Child, (Newleaf IR£9.99), a recently published resource book for parents and teachers.
He has the following comments to make.
"The first thing that strikes me is a lot of things I see in this video may be in the child's environment at home in a natural way," he says.
"There is evidence that the more we learn, the more we can learn. There is a capacity of the brain to increase as we learn, so this video is based on fairly sound psychological terms regarding a child's ability to learn," he continues.
"I'm interested in the circles and patterns, lines and colour and music they use. That is designed to develop the right side of the brain, the instinctive, creative intuitive side, that might be neglected.
"In families, we may be more likely to develop left side of the brain which has to do with structure, sequence, reading, maths, sciences. So there is a need for right brain development. Anything that facilities this is valuable, so they may have hit on something useful here."
However, he has reservations about how media messages in general are received by children.
"Television may be fostering the inability to connect actions with feelings and consequences. In the playground now, you see kids kicking each other and going for the groin. They have seen it on television but haven't experienced the feelings or the consequences.
"The inanimate screen removes you from the emotional. It can objectify and mechanise life rather than humanise it," he says.
Parenting by proxy
One of the general difficulties he has regarding childrens' toys these days is how mechanistic they have become. Soft toys have been replaced by PlayStations, dolls and dressing up by video games.
"What concerns me about the technology games is that they are very much geared towards the left side of the brain, and leave out the need in the early stages of life to communicate by touch and by feel.
"About Baby Einstein I worry that parents would sit them down in front of it and it may become parenting by proxy, supplant parents and take over their role: 'if I get them this, it will do the job for me'. I'm not saying it would happen, from my experience of parents I would tend to have confidence in them. But it's a risk, a possibility, a danger.
"I think we need to raise awareness of the possibility, while this is an interesting idea, we need to think it through.
"I would see educational videos such as Baby Einstein as an adjunct, a small piece of the parenting jigsaw. It is important too that the child is not looking at it on his own, but is watching with parents, and particularly small children should be held so there is human contact.
"There is a worry about hot-housing the kids, giving them the edge. I do see parents being competitive, this isn't new, it's as old as the hills 'I'm better than you'.
"Our children are our guarantee of the future. But if we want them to do the work we didn't do, it can become negative. When it becomes a problem is where a child may be forced beyond its capability to live out parents' unlived ambitions."