Introducing New Music To Your Kids: Internet Radio
My daughter is an absolute music freak. She loves listening to music…as long as it originates from a TV personality she is already familiar with. So you can imagine her utter horror as she says to me, “MOM! You have got to hear this new song!” which she then proceeds to play for me and I, as though $25,000 is on the line to ‘Name that Tune’, begin singing along with “Magic” word for word. Her eyes about flew out of her head as she says “You know this song?” as if I couldn’t possibly be cool enough for it to have graced my presence. “Yeah” I answered her “It’s almost as old as I am!” The look of disappointment on her face was horrible.
It never occurred to her that the song could be “old”. It was new to her, it was her discovery, and therefore should be shared with the world. I fear I may have burst her bubble on that one but it did bring up an interesting question – does how we introduce new music to our children matter in their acceptance of it? When she thought it was new, she loved the song. She couldn’t wait to share it with me and it really hurt her feelings when what was new to her was old to me. It was the process of discovery and sharing and I ruined it for her.
I decided that maybe we hadn’t been sharing enough music (aside from piano lessons) in our house and really encouraging the process of discovering music together. So a few weeks ago, I began an experiment. I made an account on Pandora Internet Radio (pandora.com) and created a station around something familiar to her. In this case, it was the soundtrack to “Harry Potter”. Then I let the station run as I prepared dinner every night for a week. When a song came on that they liked, the kids clicked the thumbs up button. If they didn’t like it so much, they would pass on it or give it the thumbs down.
You would think that the entire station would be filled with Potter tunes but instead, they realized that they like the music from lots of different movies, some they had seen and some they had not. They began playing to the music, acting it out in whatever way it moved them. My son has now taken to humming a few of the tunes when he plays alone. We can no longer just play Legos – there must be a soundtrack.
We’ve since created a Broadway station, a Kids’ Tunes station & a classical station. The kids love being the critics and deciding who stays and who gets booted off the station and I love seeing them discover something new. Would they have listened to show tunes if I had forced it on them as we drove cross country Griswold style? Probably not. But giving them a chance to comment, even if only by a click of the mouse, has opened them up to a whole new world of music.
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