As parents, we all want our children to learn new skills, but sometimes a little learning is a dangerous thing. As a friend once said, “you spend ages trying to get your kids to talk, and once they do, you wish they’d shut up”. At the moment, one skill my daughter has unfortunately learned is the ability to make Spotify repeat the same song forever.
One of the things I want most for my daughter as she grows up, along with self-respect, determination, and principles, is good taste in music. I suppose it’s partly for selfish reasons. If she’s choosing what to listen to, I don’t want to dread the prospect.
I don’t want to try to brainwash her, not least in case the exercise backfires on me. Having said that, I do tend to try and encourage her to leave the house by saying “Hey ho, let’s go”
Her listening habits have ruined the Spotify Discover Weekly playlist for me, although it is generally still just about listenable - a lot of other parents seem to suffer much worse.
Other than things she’s heard befor,e she tends to choose things on Spotify based on whether she likes the looks of the cover, and gets obsessive about having the same song on repeat, particularly just before bedtime.
Some of the songs that she’s been obsessed by over the last few months have been:
A classical guitar version of Gymnopedie
“The smiley man” doing here comes the sun
Cat Power covering Nick Cave’s Breathless
Fiesta by the Pogues
The Robots by Kraftwerk
Potato Chips by Slim Gaillard
Rise and Shine by The Cardigans
It’s easy as a parent to get into a terrible state of anxiety - are we doing it all wrong? The best antidote to this is normally talking to other parents and realising that they have the same worries. In this case, I’m fairly relaxed. If she likes Cat Power, The Pogues, The Ramones and Kraftwerk, we can’t be doing that bad a job as parents.