DVD suggestions for 1-year-old?

[Benjimum]

Hi there -

We're taking a long car trip with our one-year-old son, and we're thinking about getting a portable DVD player for the trip. Our son hasn't seen much TV, but whenever he catches a glimpse he's fascinated, so we're hoping that a DVD or two might make the trip easier on all of us. Right now I'm thinking Sesame Street (the old ones), but I'm sure there are other good DVDs out there. Does anyone have suggestions? Thanks!

Also, along the same lines, if anyone has suggestions for a good portable DVD player that will attach to a back headrest and not stick out too far - as our little guy has quite a reach - we'd appreciate that, too. I know that Babble has a "5-best portable DVD player" list, but if anyone has any other suggestions, fire away!

[Jennifer]

My girls liked the Baby Einsteins... I don't know that I buy into the fact that it makes babies smarter, and babies that young probably shouldn't watch a ton of TV, but I think a little here and there is fine (especially for something like a car trip!)... and, the Baby Einsteins are good for keeping them entertained! :-)

[Nicole Miller]

Our 19 month old absolutely LOVES the Signing Times DVD's. We drive about 3 and 1/2 hours each way to our vacation home and this has helped us many times! Also, The Laurie Berkner Band has fun, catchy videos of their songs. Sesame Street has lots of music video DVD's that arent the episodes, they are more like back to back music with all teh great characters.

[Kittson O'Neill]

I love KINDLE. He's a sweet English puppy. the pace is slow and funny and not as grating as many other videos. We also love Peep and the big wide world. Simple animation and basic science, but that may be TMI for your 12 month.

Good luck on your trip, DVDs in the car have made travel possible for us!

[Heather Geiman]

I have found Finding Nemo to be especially distracting, it is probably the super bright colors and voices. Honestly i couldn't get my daughter to pay attention to much of anything at one for more than a few minutes, maybe you could try the books with noise buttons!!

[melanie sposa]

Yo Gabba Gabba - fun music, teaches lessons, and scenes are short enough to maintain your toddler's attention. (same thing with Jack's Big Music Show).
All puppets with some humans/people to keep them attentive.

We take our 14 month old on 5-6 hour drives and rotate between S1 and 2 of YGG and the one DVD of Jack. Then we will also play some Laurie Berkner band (CD or DVD) and other music she may like or appeal to.

Good luck!

[andre bartowski]

I'd definitely recommend Baby Einstein. I noticed that my girls knew a lot of words and songs faster. They learn while they are entertained at the same time.




Howies Apprentice

[M Baxter]

The Muppet Show is popular with my kids. Baby Einstein is good.

[gena kirby]

The Following is from The Boston Globe Website: "Second, our findings suggest that preventive action can be taken with respect to attentional problems in children. Limiting young children's exposure to television as a medium during formative years of brain development consistent with the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendations may reduce children's subsequent risk of developing" attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

If you said television was crack cocaine, frying the circuits of kids and turning them into fat, illiterate thugs, politicians would demand mandatory 10-year sentences for neglectful parents, which basically means the incarceration of nearly every parent in the nation. Of course, most parents never intend to neglect their kids when they park them in front of the screen. But as the evidence mounts that TV rewires our kids, we must rewire ourselves. We can no longer use the excuse that we're too frazzled to stop electronic drug dealers from taking over our neighborhoods and hooking our children. We are not going to change television from being a universal fact of life, since 99 percent of children in the United States live in a home with a TV. What people can change is how many TVs surround them and how long they stay on.

Half of American children live in homes where there are three or more TVs. More than one third of all children 6 years old and under have a television in their bedroom, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Children 6 and under spend two hours a day in front of a screen and only 39 minutes reading or being read to.

Two out of every three small children live in homes where the TV is on at least half the time, and one out of every three small children live in homes where the TV is on nearly all the time. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2003 report "Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers," 56 percent of children in non-heavy TV homes can read by the age of 6, compared to only 34 percent of children in heavy TV homes.

So the time has come, not just for TV Turn-off Week, which is April 19-25, but TV Throwout Month. Many American homes have a TV for every person, which surely makes it more difficult for each family member to know each other as a person. If people want to throw down $3,000 for a home theater to cuddle around, fine. But get the TVs out of the kids' bedrooms. The statistics all but guarantee that a kid will flip on the latest rerun of Star Wars before picking up a book on the solar system.

Ban TV during the school week. Until the statistics show a dramatic change, it ought to be as much a law as curfew. Last year, the College Board's National Commission on Writing reported that the average fourth grader spent about six times more time watching television than writing. In high school, 75 percent of high school seniors say they no longer receive written assignments in history and social studies. But they watch on average 3 hours of TV a day.

If people who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, then people who do not learn that history exists are just plain doomed.

Three years ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics saw enough of the studies on the effects of television to declare that older children should be limited to one to two hours of daily entertainment media. The academy recommended no television for children 2 and under. The latest study on television and attention problems makes it even more important to pay attention to what we are doing to our kids.

So often, we park our kids in front of the electronic baby sitter because we are fried. That excuse is no longer valid now that we know that the passive baby sitter we let into the house turned out to be a drug dealer, altering the brain perhaps even more permanently than a bag of dope.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is [e-mail].

[M Baxter]

Yeah, but a car trip is probably not going to fry the kid's brain. We aren't big watchers of TV here. But we also are not big fans of long miserable car trips with screaming toddlers.

[Lucia Real-Martin]

I am with Jennifer on the Baby Einsteins - my twin boys aged 19 months absolutely love them and whether they are smarter or not, I don't care, it is not the Simpsons or other TV garbabe and they learn about animals in different languages, love the music and it is very comforting to babies - I would recommend any of the classical music ones Mozart, Beethoven, Bath or the animals ones.

I found that at 12 month of age they were not ready to focus on Sesame St or other characters that carry a story.

Also, you may want to check Pocoyo, a little blue character that has Spanish / English episodes with his little friends (animals) and it is suitable for 12-24 month old babies.

Good luck with the trip!

Lucia