Why do we want our children to love the music we love, eh? The relationship we have with music is a deep one – our favourite tunes are there to nurse us through heartbreak, accompany us on adventures, be drunkenly belted out at karaoke nights, sang along with in the car, and cooed to our sleepy babies.
But it turns out there’s a window for shaping your children’s music tastes – if you want to raise a rock god, rap superstar or something more niche like a polka champion, you have to get in there before they’ve hit double figures.
A study, commissioned by streaming service Deezer, found any influencing of your kids’ musical tastes needs to start by the time they’re 10. Dads are more likely to try to shape their kids’ music taste (78%, as opposed to 69% of mums); mums are more successful at it though, with 38% reporting their kids loved the music they shared with them, while only 30% of dads managed that.
That’ll be the Limp Bizkits for you (though personally I blame my weakness for some Sepultura).
“Children have an ‘openness’ to new music, and this means parents have an important role to play in developing the musical preferences of their kids,” said Dr Hauke Egermann of the University of York, who worked on the study.
“During adolescence, children tend to gravitate away from their parents’ choices and are more influenced by their peers. By playing children a variety of genres before this critical period, research on familiarisation suggests they will enjoy lots of different types of music as adults.”
The transformative, transcendent experience of falling in love with music when you’re young is a wonderful, magical thing. As an adult, you know that the people making these tunes are just people – but as a young fan it feels like sounds have been sculpted by the gods themselves. Lyrics that seem to adult ears are impossibly profound if you hear them at the right time.
“What’s this rubbish kids are listening to these days?” we’ll think. “This is just noise compared to the classics from when I was young – uh, Puddle Of Mudd, Crazy Town, the circa-2000 ska-punk revival that produced some of the laziest music ever made… They don’t write them like that anymore.” No, they really don’t.
Remember, there’ll be points where however cool the stuff you’re introducing your kids to is, they’ll still be able to find it incredibly lame, because if you like it, it must suck, right? And then we’re all just Adam Buxton from this sketch, pushing a bowdlerised NWA on an unimpressed son.
But encouraging a wider taste in music, Dr Hauke Egermann said, will improve your child’s ability to manage their emotions, socialise and bond with others more easily – as well to have a better understanding of other cultures.
Nine in 10 parents surveyed considered exposure to a variety of music to be important, while a third had specifically tried to play their children music they considered “culturally important”. Some genres were more easily shared with children than others, with pop crossing generations a lot more easily than metal, which is a massive shame.
Tactics parents use to expose their children to music include blasting tunes in the car and dancing – this latter tactic will absolutely not work on teenagers, by the way, and they will be extremely mean about your moves.
This obsession with our kids loving the same music as us might just be a case of wish-fulfilment – perhaps, just perhaps, if you expose your kid to the right music, they’ll grow up to be the pop star you always secretly wished you could be. You want all your children’s dreams to come true, and if their dreams just happen to closely resemble your ones, that can’t hurt, right…?
Even if you’re not particularly fussed about your kids’ playlists matching yours, think about the long game. You can spend their teenage years shouting, “Turn that crap down!” and standing nonplussed at the back of concerts they’ve begged you to take them to – or be right with them in the mosh pit, far enough away that you don’t embarrass them, of course.