News from the Music Industry

“I wish I could videotape what we see every day and let you watch it, because you wouldn’t believe it,” Roberson says. “These kids are absolutely taking these lyrics to heart and translating them into their everyday lives, in the way they dress, the way they talk and act. They aren’t able to separate fantasy from reality, and it’s destroying their innocence.”

The Musical Divide

Of course, grown-ups have always had generational differences with kids over music. Our parents couldn’t wrap themselves around the gangsta trappings of Biggie and Tupac. Their parents abhorred the haze-infused guitar licks of Jimi Hendrix and Sly & the Family Stone. The difference with our children’s music, though, is that more and more it’s saturated with very sexually explicit, misogynistic and violent words and images. And too often it aims to convince young fans that there’s much more value in sexing, slapping, slinging and slinking their way through life than in going to school, honoring basic social norms, and treating themselves and others with respect.

What’s more, today kids can hear questionable music everywhere–from morning radio to after-school television shows to the local beauty salon and barbershop. The result is a generation of young people who are being taught to think it’s cool to grow up to be somebody’s bitch, ho, thug or worse, says Michael Rich, M.D., director of the Center on Media and Child Health at the Children’s Hospital Boston. “We all have to recognize that kids learn from the media they see and hear,” says Rich, a pediatrician and adolescent psychologist who has long studied the effects of media on kids. He explains that children, who are trying to figure out the way the world works and how they fit in it, are looking to popular music, movies and TV shows to help them figure out who they should be.

Given that many children spend more time with some form of media than they do at school or with parents, Rich says, they’re more likely to be influenced by the likes of a Nelly or an Eminem. “We are fooling ourselves when we think they’re not being changed by that,” Rich says.

What Parents Can Do

Protecting our children from harmful images can be a tall order as we struggle to balance work schedules, relationships and time for self with child-rearing challenges. But you can make it happen. Some ideas:

Listen and learn. You may not appreciate the musical value when Snoop Dogg warbles, “Drop it like it’s hot,” but your child has her own reasons for liking it, and a big part of that may be because you don’t. Instead of telling your child to turn it off, ask her to turn it up. Have her play some of her favorite songs for you, and ask her in a nonjudgmental way what she likes about them.

She may resist at first, but eventually she’ll find it gratifying that she’s “teaching” you something about the music she likes. This will open up the door to a discussion about the merits of the music’s content and make her more open to hearing why it concerns you. “Kids like it when parents learn from them,” Rich says.

Challenge your child to analyze the content. When Lisa Cockerham, 31, of Chicago, heard her 12-year-old daughter, Lana, singing the chorus to a popular Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz song–”To the window/To the wall/Till the sweat drop down my balls”–she turned the radio off and asked her daughter point-blank whether she knew what “balls” were. Cockerham was glad to learn that her child didn’t know, but she still took the time to explain to her in an age-appropriate way why she felt the lyrics were offensive.