In today's Guardian, I wrote a piece about the perils of trying to introduce your children to rock and pop. It's an area of parenthood in which I've had what you might politely term qualified success: thanks to my desperate ministrations, my three-year-old now likes pop music, but I wouldn't describe it as a wonderful shared experience. Since the article was written, she's shifted her affections from Spacer by Shelia and B Devotion to Hung Up by Madonna.
The first time she heard it – when I stuck the recent Madonna greatest hits set on in the car – her face lit up in a really magical way, but even the joy of seeing my child have a totally genuine, entirely unmediated response to music was tempered by the crushing realisation that I was now going to have to listen to the track at least seven or eight times in a row, on a daily basis.
As I said in the piece, I'm not sure that trying to influence your child's music taste is such a hot idea: there have been articles telling you how to do it, but I found them simultaneously preachy, smug and a bit creepy, like something that might have been found in the smouldering ruins of David Koresh's Waco compound.
I think the whole idea smacks of terrible one-upmanship and solipsism, of the deadening, overweening arrogance of the older music fan, ever-ready to loudly express the belief that nothing in the present can hope to match the music of their past. I think, at least in theory, that rock and pop should be something that divides parents and children. In reality, however, I can't help but be drawn to the experience of sharing music with my kids.
Which brings us to you. Has anyone out there genuinely had a positive experience of doing this? If so, what was the music that you bonded over? Does anyone out there have lovely memories of having shared music with their parents? Or should, as I've suggested above, they be kept well away from their children's music taste, lest they put them off for life?
