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Parenting
parenting
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Parenting
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Entertainment
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We've all been there: You're driving with the kids, when the song on the radio changes and before you can flip the station and the lyrics "Sex in the air / I don't care…But chains and whips excite me” float through your minivan. Nice. You can hear the question from your 4-year old before it's even asked: "dad, what's a whip?"
Listening to the radio with kids can be tricky. Sure, Taylor Swift is a good bet, but Rihanna? Not so much. As a dad of two girls under eight, I'm amazed at how many songs on the radio at any given moment are filled with language that's just not appropriate for kids. I really shouldn't be: A whopping 69% of all mainstream rock-n-roll songs contain a reference to sex, alcohol or drugs or contain profanity, according to a recent study.
The best way to ensure your kids don't get an earful of something questionable is to burn them a CD every few weeks. Here's how:
Start with Billboard.com which has all the publication's charts online and allows you to play a sample of almost all the songs listed, says Mike Bruno, Asisstant Managing Editor at EW.com, and dad to two kids under five. "You can play the snippets for your kid, see if she likes them -- she may know more of the hits than you do, from hearing them on the radio, at friends' houses etc -- then go to lyrics sites like metrolyrics.com to make sure they're appropriate before purchasing a download." You'll find yourself updating every few weeks, because kids play songs out pretty quickly and need fresh stuff often.
Get to know artists and filter your browsing: Rihanna has a couple of songs that are borderline, but is mostly just too raunchy for young kids, says Bruno, so when you're in Billboard, skip those songs altogether -- playing the sample and getting her excited for a song you won't allow is a sure way to make that the ONLY song she really likes. And for the most part, hip-hop is really hard to make work, so plan on digging deep and spending time to find the popular rap artists and songs that enable you to expose her to that genre. It can be done, but it takes commitment.
Introducing new music is hard -- often, kids want to hear what they already love. Once your kid starts to recognize artists by their voice, you can start to go back through the catalog and pick other safe songs that might get her excited. You can also start to feel out her taste (loves female pop singers, loves bouncy beats, loves big sweeping ballads, whatever) and try to squeak in a new song here and there. It'll never work as the first thing you play, but after a few of "her" songs, you can ask for a pick of your own and usually get it through without too much complaining. Even if she doesn't love it at first, do that a few times with the same song, and guess what? That's now a song she does know, and you're halfway home.
Have fun, and try new things. "Front load the CD you burn with sure things," says Bruno, "then bury a few new exposure attempts within the second half to see what happens." The fact is, she probably won't often make it past the first two songs on there anyway, if you've front loaded properly, but there will be times when she leaves the CD playing in the background and you'll get those new ones in there. Above all, be active in her listening, answer her questions, talk about the music and artists in a way that's engaging to her, dance around the room to the good ones, and you'll grow her love of music.
Make copies of the CD for wherever you listen to music -- the playroom, her room, the car -- this way you can focus on the road -- not on the radio.
