I keep pretty close limits on the music I let my children buy. They can hear what they want on the radio, but in terms of downloading it into iPods where they can listen to the same thing over and over again, I have standards.
For one thing, I don't want my son perseverating over some wildly inappropriate phrase and blurting it out repeatedly at school. For another, my daughter is even more clueless about what the words mean than most kids, and there's a danger that she'll pick up an undesirable term or two, too, and use it in ways that will get her teased or worse.
This is true even for songs that don't have the parental advisory "explicit" tag, 'cause it's not always out-and-out curse words that I worry about (though I can surely do without them, too).
Still, one thing I'll admit to liking about those risky, risqué songs: They're powerful motivators. I believe in keeping my kids' ears and brains safe from bad influences, but I'm also a big believer in "whatever works," and if the lure of a forbidden song can get my son to do educational activities and pick up life skills in ways that he'd ordinarily resist ... I'm starting to think that might not be such a bad trade-off with a 14-year-old.
There are three songs that my son has been wanting and wanting and wanting, and I have been denying and denying and denying, though he nags me nearly to death. So I posed him three really big challenges: Make your bed every day during the summer. Write a blog entry every day during the summer. Read a book with me every day over the summer. And for each of these, he will get one of those songs that I have previously nixed.
These are not small terms. I started a blog for him a couple of years ago, for writing practice, but he's not followed through with it. He's been much more interested lately in TV watching than in book reading. And bed-making is one thing I've never been able to get him to cooperate on learning to do. I would love for him to do these three things, but it won't be a tragedy if he doesn't. That makes them good challenges for a contest in which I'm not wild about the reward.
We've been on-challenge now for a couple of weeks, and darned if he isn't doing his part every day without complaint. The summer is long, and there's plenty of time left to slip. But there's also modest reason to believe that those songs might be motivating enough to get him through. My distress at delivering the disturbing downloads is mitigated somewhat by the fact that I've noticed he has as short an attention span for songs as he does for everything else. A song he's dying for today will have slipped to the bottom of his playlist in a week or two. So I can be a magnanimous mom, and let him be a cool teen, without fearing that he's going to listen to it constantly forever until it burns into his brain. I hope.
Now, he's talking about wanting a video iPod, a device previously considered too expensive and high-tech for him. I wonder if he wants one badly enough to stop sucking his fingers? Maybe a project for the fall.
Photo: Peter DaSilva/Getty Images