Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Giri offers suggestions on how to avoid the pitfalls of the Toddler Music Industrial Complex.
Tom:
Some months ago, I was pleased when my son, squarely in his twos, developed a taste for songs from the movie Moana. Unfortunately, for reasons I cannot understand, this taste has now evolved away from the Oscar-nominated originals in favor of songs from the live-action remake, which are the same but off by just slightly enough to annoy myself and his mother, and from Moana 2, which are Temu-grade knockoffs. I know I should count my blessings that he’s fixated on this and not some of the truly unlistenable garbage Big Toddler is trying to push these days, but nonetheless this outcome feels like a small failure. Can you tell me some horror stories about media your children got into, so that I can feel properly chastened for caring about this? Or if by some miracle you’ve ever succeeded in improving your children’s artistic tastes, I’d love to hear about that too.
My daughter's now at 19 months. My plan was to not proactively introduce children's programming into the household, holding out until the outside world inevitably encroaches in (a.k.a. she goes to a friend's house once). This was not a delusional effort to insulate her from the rich pop culture of her toddler peers, and transmit to her the exact cultural tastes of a millennial, which would only be child cruelty; I don't want her to rock up to daycare and complain about how the album format is dead. All I want is to fend off the screens for awhile and slough off the idea that children can only enjoy music that specifically caters to them. So far it's been a pretty decent game plan that has allowed us to enjoy lots of regular-style programming at home. I like it.
With video, it's been easy enough to hold the line. To the best of her knowledge, our TV is a device that sporadically displays "nenni" (tennis), "baball" (basketball), or sometimes the cover of the album we're listening to, but is mostly just a black expanse. Having sports on has actually had the miraculous effect of rendering the TV an uninteresting object in our home, because sports do not have the ability to capture her attention—unless one day they suddenly did, in which case, hell yeah. I'll keep going to the pediatrician and expecting them to read "combo guard" off the growth charts.
Music had been going pretty great, too. When she was a tiny baby I played lots of mellow and ambient fare: She would sit in the tub or snooze on my belly as we listened to stuff like Steve Roach, Hiroshi Yoshimura, the Vegyn remix of Air's Moon Safari. We love Bad Bunny, so that was an inevitable addition, especially a favorite from his last record, "Baile Inolvidable," which invokes mi diabla, mi ángel, mi loquita, a relatable refrain for parents of an infant sleeping poorly. D'Angelo dominated the household airwaves for a solid month after his death.
At some point my daughter went through what I fondly recall as her "conscious rap" phase, by which I mostly mean she enjoyed a couple songs by Common, especially "Go," which caused me to unfortunately pay attention to the lyrics for the first time. This fall we listened to the latest This is Lorelei record a lot, plus some Funkadelic and Sly Stone stints. Unsurprisingly she hasn't really taken to my current deep dive into the Autechre discography. But it's always fun to put on "grownup" music and see what, if anything, she responds to.
However! Exceptions were made. Her cousins are into Caspar Babypants—profiled by Eric Nusbaum on our site in 2021—and I like him too, so he's been in the mix. There are some heaters on the jazz Sesame Street album. And an interactive children's book gifted by her grandparents introduced her to Pororo, a penguin character beloved in Korea. The book plays a few simplified songs on the press of a button, some of which were real earworms, so we decided to play the originals. There were English versions available, but I made the (I think still correct) decision that cloying children's music is much more tolerable when it's being sung in a language I do not understand. But these songs are finally starting to drive me nuts, too.
Daycare has become the other vector for introducing toddler staples like "Sleeping Bunnies" and "Baby Shark." I love how she dances to these songs, and we now play them at home. Now she has started saying "No" when we play any songs outside that list. In fairness, she also frequently says "No" even when we play her preferred songs, so maybe she is protesting our very control over the music, and wants to commandeer the aux cable. I'm trying to figure out if I can redirect her back to being interested in non-kids music, but that project appears to be on pause for a bit. If I have any success on this front I'll report back.
I imagine there's a red line somewhere out there in my future, some nefarious toddler musical equivalent of the Havana Syndrome ray, and I will have to pretend that this particular song has disappeared from my phone, which otherwise contains the history of recorded music, and hopefully she'll believe me. But for the most part I'll try and shut off my ears and savor the dance moves on display. In times of crisis I'll accept her imposing martial law on the stereo, while still trying to counter-program her with better music in peacetime. It'll be fine. The most precious person in your universe has a burgeoning sense of taste, and like so many parents before you, you think it sort of stinks, but love that they have it.
A few days ago we had a recent experience that tested my no-video policy. Flight delays had us sitting on the tarmac, which would have been perfectly fine a few months ago, but is much harder to wrangle in her current ultra-wiggly state. My wife caved and clicked around on the in-flight entertainment until they landed on the trailer to Monsters Inc. Unsurprisingly, the trailer to Monsters Inc. hit like crack. Frenzied, motioning with her hands, she asked for "More." This cycle repeated itself until she had watched the trailer 5 times in a row. We decided not to watch the movie in its entirety, instead playing a rudimentary in-flight game which had us move a bird around an array.
I don't know why I preferred that to a movie, exactly. I love Monsters Inc. I couldn't fully articulate a philosophy here, except that I wanted to the screen to make itself boring to her in a relatively short amount of time. And it succeeded. Instead of being hooked on a feature-length film, she soon got her fill of the bird game and resumed wiggling around for the rest of the challenging flight. Success, but at what cost. Once she is irreversibly aware of the video format, I imagine we'll watch full-length TV episodes and full-length movies. All I'm trying to do is avoid, at all costs, short-form video, which has barbecued my brain, and the Cocomelon-style fare, which seems to inflict similar damage on poor babies. Who knows how long we'll hold out?
