Music for Kids
Things (friends' comments, a video posted, a blog post) have been bringing up this subject at least weekly for the past month or more, so I thought I'd post about it and solicit others' thoughts on the subject.
What music would you play for your little kids?
Alice loves music. She sings morning, noon and night, gleefully makes up her own silly songs about the events of her day and loves to sing along with us anytime. She's doing very well in her music class and has started moving beyond her assigned pieces to improvising her own variations on what she's been learning. She loves to dance--one of the rules around here is that she can play the godawful electronic pop tune on her glowing butterfly wand only if she dances along to it. Every night she goes to sleep listening to one of the albums on the iPod plugged into the speakers in her room.
She's got a variety of music on there--classical, folk, "Here Comes Science" from They Might Be Giants and Schoolhouse Rock and The Barenaked Ladies' "Snacktime" and all of the Music Together CDs and "Peter and the Wolf" and various other things. But we don't give her pop music, per se, and we don't listen to it with her. She has no idea who Katy Perry is (unlike the 5 year old niece of a friend, who requested the current movie as her birthday party) or who Justin Bieber might be (unlike the 7 year old foster daughter of another friend, who was caught kissing his picture on my friend's iPad recently) nor has she ever to my knowledge heard anything by Adele (who's "Rolling in the Deep" is stuck in the head of another friend's 7 or 8 year old). I think she once saw a photo of Lady Gaga (whose "Bad Romance" was being sung by six year olds in the back seat of another friend's car recently) and asked about her, but she wouldn't know any of her music.
I don't recall this being a decision we made. Each of us listens to music fairly sporadically. When I'm alone in the car I listen to NPR until I get weary of bad news and then I hit search until I hear something fun, but I turn it off when Alice is riding with me, because I'd rather talk with her and teach her how to look around herself as we drive. When we're on longer trips we often put in one of her CDs. A few times we've turned on the radio and let her choose what to listen to, but she's never seemed that interested. One time as I was scanning for something good, she said she liked a rap song's beat, but I explained that I don't like the words they're saying and we moved on to something else.
With it coming up so frequently that young kids her age are aware of and into popular music, it's making me think about this. I guess I always figured that she's learn about pop music from her friends, in middle school. Or maybe kindergarten now. Are we depriving Alice of a degree of cultural literacy, or over-protecting her, or simply shielding ourselves from annoying bubblegum and awkward questions?
Thoughts?
This entry was originally posted at http://lillibet.dreamwidth.org/610844.html. You can comment either place! There are
comments over there now.
What music would you play for your little kids?
Alice loves music. She sings morning, noon and night, gleefully makes up her own silly songs about the events of her day and loves to sing along with us anytime. She's doing very well in her music class and has started moving beyond her assigned pieces to improvising her own variations on what she's been learning. She loves to dance--one of the rules around here is that she can play the godawful electronic pop tune on her glowing butterfly wand only if she dances along to it. Every night she goes to sleep listening to one of the albums on the iPod plugged into the speakers in her room.
She's got a variety of music on there--classical, folk, "Here Comes Science" from They Might Be Giants and Schoolhouse Rock and The Barenaked Ladies' "Snacktime" and all of the Music Together CDs and "Peter and the Wolf" and various other things. But we don't give her pop music, per se, and we don't listen to it with her. She has no idea who Katy Perry is (unlike the 5 year old niece of a friend, who requested the current movie as her birthday party) or who Justin Bieber might be (unlike the 7 year old foster daughter of another friend, who was caught kissing his picture on my friend's iPad recently) nor has she ever to my knowledge heard anything by Adele (who's "Rolling in the Deep" is stuck in the head of another friend's 7 or 8 year old). I think she once saw a photo of Lady Gaga (whose "Bad Romance" was being sung by six year olds in the back seat of another friend's car recently) and asked about her, but she wouldn't know any of her music.
I don't recall this being a decision we made. Each of us listens to music fairly sporadically. When I'm alone in the car I listen to NPR until I get weary of bad news and then I hit search until I hear something fun, but I turn it off when Alice is riding with me, because I'd rather talk with her and teach her how to look around herself as we drive. When we're on longer trips we often put in one of her CDs. A few times we've turned on the radio and let her choose what to listen to, but she's never seemed that interested. One time as I was scanning for something good, she said she liked a rap song's beat, but I explained that I don't like the words they're saying and we moved on to something else.
With it coming up so frequently that young kids her age are aware of and into popular music, it's making me think about this. I guess I always figured that she's learn about pop music from her friends, in middle school. Or maybe kindergarten now. Are we depriving Alice of a degree of cultural literacy, or over-protecting her, or simply shielding ourselves from annoying bubblegum and awkward questions?
Thoughts?
This entry was originally posted at http://lillibet.dreamwidth.org/610844.html. You can comment either place! There are
comments over there now.