Disney Offers Refund for Potentially Harmful Baby Einstein DVDs

If you’ve bought the Baby Einstein DVDs for your little one and wondered why s/he is not yet reading “Crime and Punishment” and proving the nonsqueezing theorem in symplectic geometry, you may finally have your answer.  Turns out, the Baby Einstein videos may actually be detrimental to early childhood development — which is why the company is offering refunds to the millions of parents who’ve bought them.

In short:  The videos are less Einstein, more Federline.

The offer is a result of lawyers threatening a class-action lawsuit for unfair and deceptive practices unless Disney agreed to refund the full purchase price to all who bought the videos since 2004.

“The Walt Disney Company’s entire Baby Einstein marketing regime is based on express and implied claims that their videos are educational and beneficial for early childhood development,” a letter from the lawyers said, calling those claims “false because research shows that television viewing is potentially harmful for very young children.”

Baby Einstein products and videos are extremely common in U.S. homes — Disney sold $200 million worth of the products last year — even though pediatricians recommend that children under 2 should watch no television at all, and early TV exposure may be linked to attention problems later in life.

Why, that’s just ridiculous.  I LOVED watching TV when I was a kid and I don’t have any —

Wait.  What were we talking about again?

Oh, right:  If you have Baby Einstein videos and would like a refund because they didn’t turn your child into Doogie Howser, or if you could just use some lunch money for your kid, visit the company’s Guarantee/Upgrade Offer page.