Children's Music

Children's music once meant only singing silly songs with and for your children. But children's music is now a big industry that produces every type of music imaginable, specifically for children. Children's music has always been an important part of a child's growth and development. Children's music helped provide some of the building blocks for a child's development of spoken language. And children's music made learning many things easier and more memorable for the child.

Before music recordings, TV, radio, and the movies, children's music was something that a parent, relative, caregiver, or sibling provided. Children's music meant parents singing lullabies to their babies. Children's music meant Grandma singing Itsy Bitsy Spider, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Old Mac Donald and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for a captivated audience of grandchildren. Children's music meant all the great and silly songs you learned at summer camp. (Why did the let us sing about Bottles of Beer on the Wall?) Children's music was simple and innocent. Although, not entirely without calamity. After all, the Old Lady Who Swallowed the Fly, did die in the end.

Children's music meant all of those silly songs you learned somewhere, but who knows where. How many times could you sing, On Top of Spaghetti? or Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts? Our capacity for gross nonsense seemed bottomless. But that was what children's music meant. That has all changed now. Sure, kids still sing some version of the old songs. Yeah, Mares still eat oats, but they probably learned their children's music from a CD or a music video or on TV. Oh, I'm sure some parents still sing lullabies to their babies, but many just lay their baby in the crib and turn on the CD player. Children's music is a professional affair these days.

It is hard for an off key a cappella parent to compete with a professional musician backed up by a full band in some studio produced version of children's music. Sure children's music has come a long way and certainly children deserve the best children's music we can provide for them, but I just can't help missing the good old days when children's music wasn't such an industry and children's music was a thing that parents and families provided for their children. Children's music is such a big business now with CD's and concert performances and all the ancillary products that go along with it. Some of the children's music is of very high quality, but maybe that isn't the only point of children's music...

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