Kids and Music
I was reading an interesting article by Alexis Petridis on The Guardian discussing whether you should try to influence your kid’s tastes in music. I don’t have kids myself, though as I’ve mentioned before I do have a 12 year old niece with very strong opinions on music. But this idea of should I or shouldn’t I nudge her musical tastes in one direction or another has often crossed my mind (as well as with regard to any possible future progeny). Normally it all falls apart because I eventually realize that contributing my proteins to the gene pool is probably a bad idea for everyone.
Putting that aside, I love the idea of sharing music with kids. I frequently play music for my niece in the car. Sometimes she goes for it, and sometimes she just turns to me and says ‘Uncle Sean, you listen to really weird music!’ (her reaction after listening to Goldfrapp one day). But I figure it’s better to let her hear it and then make up her own mind than never getting a chance to hear it at all. After all, as I mentioned in my weird little rant against radio the other day, even she admitted that they played too many of the same songs over and over with very little variation.
I think she has a pretty diverse taste when it comes to music. She loves David Bowie and CCR, but also loves Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift. She had me nervous when she was obsessed with Lady Gaga for about a month, but she got sick of it pretty quickly, thank the music gods. But during that month, both myself and her mother as well as our mother debated whether to ’step in’ and have a music intervention. Ultimately we decided against it, which I think was the right way to go. We could have said ‘Oh, that’s not good music!’, but I think that would have done more harm than good. It’s also pretty douchey, admittedly.
My parents listened to a lot of different kinds of music when I was growing up, but I don’t remember them ever telling me what I should listen to (beyond the typical parental intervention stuff like overt sex references or heavy swearing – and even then they were pretty low key about it). I think the hands off approach really helped me form my own musical identity. I took a little bit of my dad (jazz, weird stuff like Vangelis), a little bit from my mom (60s girl groups, The Kinks) and plenty from my sister (The Cure, Duran Duran, 80s gothy new wave). But because no one was dictating content, I could honestly cling to all of it as *my* taste, and not simply someone else’s tastes foisted on me.
So in the end I think being engaged but not dictatorial is the way to go. Expose them to the music, but don’t force it on them. They’ll figure it out for themselves, much as my niece did with Lady Gaga (‘She’s dirty’). What do you think? Any fun music-related kid experiences you’d like to share? Any experiences as a parent? Let’s get an interesting conversation started!
Galaxie 500 – Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste
Tags: galaxie 500, Rants
