PUNK ROCK & PARENTING

By Brandon Strumlauf

Oh no… It’s time. You’re in your thirties and if you are anything like me, you’re having a hard time letting go of the glory days of partying until 3 a.m. and wasting your money on NFTs. Instead, you are likely lacking sleep due to a kiddo or two that won’t go night-night.

Instead of giving up your identity to parenting, you can perpetuate your hobbies and the best parts of yourself into your kids. They will definitely develop their own tastes and desires, but you can impart your passion just as easily as starting from a clean slate. On the following page, I’m going to list five ways to help mold your kids into tolerable humans with decently eclectic music taste.

Bring Your Kids To Shows

They don’t have to be the best bands, but they should be live music and tolerable. Even the bad openers will be great exposure to the scene. There will be people dressed differently there, and with different hairstyles. This should help build familiarity with a visage that is different than the banal life we live day in and day out.

Tell Your Kids About Your Favorite Bands

Go into great detail. Share your passion for music and art with them. Why do you like a particular song? What does that song mean to you and what you stand for? The moment is the message. These songs are the soundtrack to our lives, so make it meaningful and impactful. Kids pick up on things like that.

Pick Up An Instrument And Jam With Your Kids

Yeah, The Partridge Family was kind of wacky, but they were on to something with the family band. The Jackson Five also knew what a family band meant. If your kids understand how fun playing music is, it will help them develop a skill for the rest of their lives. Kids that play music with their parents also develop a stronger bond with them. According to a University of Arizona News article by Alexis Blue, “Children who grow up listening to music with their parents report having better quality relationships with their moms and dads when they reach young adulthood.”

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Share Music From Other Countries Help Them Find Their People

Music is personal, unique, and culturally relevant. It helps people find their internal beat, and develop into the person that they choose to be. It is also a reflection of lifestyle, which is to say, that discovery of self is an important part of child rearing. “People think of the hearing brain as being a silo within the brain. In fact, our hearing engages our cognitive, sensory, motor, and reward systems. That’s huge. From an evolutionary perspective, being able to make sense of sound is ancient and has engaged all these different perspectives,” said neuroscientist and author, Nina Kraus, in an Edutopia article.

Society is based on social structures. Friend groups have a high correlation with success and ensure that your children are with the people they respect and admire, as well as are respected and admired by. Music is the basis for great community cohesion and is the conversational language, even when no common language is shared.

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