you don’t have to listen to crappy kids’ music #10yearsaparent

It took me a few years of Laurie Berkner on repeat being pushed to the very edge of insanity to come to the realization that just because you have kids doesn’t mean that you have to listen to crappy kids’ music.

It’s a slippery slope – you want to do something nice for your child, give them the best environment that you can so that they grow and learn and blossom. And you think, Music! Music is what we need!

And music made specifically for kids is not torturous at first, if you listen to it once in awhile or maybe just once. It’s the repetitive nature of the songs and the repetitive nature in which your kids want to listen to it that will makes you want to poke your eyeballs out.

Again Mama! Again!

And you oblige because what else can you do really? You made the playlist. You bought the songs. You created your own mind numbing reality. You lied to yourself that the They Might Be Giants children’s album is actually good. You put the Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas album in the CD player in July because you thought it would be cute. You encouraged the Let It Go sing alongs and were right there belting it out…at first.

But what if I told you it doesn’t have to be this way? You could avoid all of that pain and suffering and skip right over to music that you actually like?

After about two years of listening to songs about storm clouds and big boy pants, my husband staged a musical intervention on behalf of our entire family.

Enough is enough, he said and much to my relief promptly took over our children’s musical education. Our household is a classic/alternative rock kind of place, and so we ditched the kiddie music for songs that we could tolerate hearing and singing on a daily basis.

Here are a few of our favorites that work surprisingly well as lullabies, and make us feel like real people and not singing automatons. Sure there are some adult themes here: boozing, wanderlust, smuggling, lost loves. We’ve told our kids that they are songs about pirates and cowboys which makes them even more appealing.

• Southern Cross, Crosby Stills Nash and Young
• Sattelite, Guster
• Sloop John B, The Beach Boys
• Patience, Guns & Roses
• Changes in Latitudes, Jimmy Buffet
• A Pirate Looks at Forty, Jimmy Buffet
• Every Rose Has Its Thorn, Poison

This is our family’s list and I challenge you to make your own. Are you into country? Broadway? Celine Dion? Start listening to what you love with your family, and your children will carry those songs with them forever – long after the chorus to the bumble bee song fades from their memories.

I promise you when you’re driving on the interstate with the windows down and you glance in the rearview mirror to see your child bust into the chorus of a song, your heart will be so full of love it will split right in half.

And that is really what it’s all about. Right?

#tenyearsaparent is a weekly blog series about what I’ve learned in my first ten years as a parent. Whether you’re a parent nodding in agreement or shaking your head with disgust or a non-parent using these posts as birth control (the surgeon general wants me to tell you that reading blog posts about parenting is not an effective form of birth control), I’ll be spilling the beans on what parenting is really all about.