My Kids Are Always Singing

Even before my kids were born, we always had music in the house. Records, radio, streaming, whatever, just something playing in the background. After my kids were born, we introduced them to music pretty much from the time we brought them home from the hospital. Music is supposed to be good for their little developing brains, right? As they have gotten older, the music has remained. They always ask for (demand) lullabies, they tell Alexa what to play, (we tell Alexa “thumbs down” when they aren’t paying attention), and they are always singing. Always. What used to be comfortably in the background has been thrust loudly to the foreground.

Between my wife and I, we’ve exposed our kids to a pretty wide variety of music. Classic dad rock of Seger and Springsteen. Crooners of Dean and Frank. Pop icons of Michael Jackson and Phil Collins. And yes, even a few people who weren’t already on the charts in the 1970s – my oldest daughter’s first concert was Lauren Daigle. All they have absorbed is coming out, almost to the point where they can communicate entirely in song. Its like I’m living in the lowest budget production of Les Miserables ever made. While it can certainly be entertaining, it can also make me les miserables.

Singing the Wrong Words

I try not to hold it against them when my kids get the words wrong. Their vocabulary isn’t fully developed yet and even if they’ve heard the words before they don’t understand the lyrics. However, what is really something to hear is how much they lean into the incorrect lyrics. They sing them with gusto, insist they are singing it right, and will fight over it if you have the gall to correct them. The greatest hits include:

• In “Believer” by Imagine Dragons, they’ve interpreted they lyric “You made me a, made me a believer, believer” as “Pick me up, pick me up Aleela, Aleela.” As if there was a person whose name was Aleela that they are asking to hoist them in the air.
• I don’t know the name of the song, but the word “Lord” was consistently replaced with “bone.” Slippery slope all around on that one.
• In “Love Fool” by the Cardigans, they have changed “Love me, love me. Say that you love me.” To “Burgundy, burgundy. Say you love me.” I’d say its impossible to make that song worse, but not sure if that makes it any better.
• In “This is Me” from The Greatest Showman, my daughter insists they say “sexy kay.” I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know what sexy means and that she’s just mimicking sounds. Or at least that’s what I’ll tell myself.

They Sing Like a Broken Record

My kids can sing the same song for hours. However, they don’t know all the words to any song, or at least any song that longer than “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” So we get treated to the same few lines – or sometimes same few words – over and over again. One lyric at a time follows an endless loop of annoyance, white noise, and then back to annoyance when you realize its been twenty minutes and they are still on “I just don’t belong here, I hope you’ll understand” and Gabriella is yet to go her own way. If you know you know.

The flip side to this coin is going from a lyric in one song, to a lyric in a completely different one, and then to yet another. Its like listening to a commercial for “Now That’s What I Call Out of Key Singing 37” – from the the bastards that brought you Kidz Bop.

A Musical Play by Play

Sometimes the kids just sing what they happen to be doing at that moment. I’ve heard songs about legos, lunch, shoes, coloring, pretty much anything they do. Always unprompted. It’s like they are recreating the scene in Elf where Buddy sings to his dad, and I’m standing there like James Caan waiting for the chorus to make sense. But it’s not like I put them on the spot and tell them to sing me a song, causing them to panic and try to make up lyrics based on whatever is in their line of sight. They were just struck by the mood to sing about their oatmeal.

Just Sounds

I was going to say “just notes”, but that would be a stretch. Sometimes its a long, sustained single sound. Sometimes repetitive noises like they are playing the drums in an a capella group. Sometimes they sound like they are trying to hold a note while riding a roller coaster – it goes up, it goes down, it gets louder, it gets quieter. But it doesn’t stop.

In cases where they don’t have a wrong word to use, they swap out words (or whole lines) they don’t know for sounds. Usually “oooohs” or “aaahs” that mostly match the pitch of the words they’re replacing. Always at a higher volume than necessary.

It can be loud and it can be annoying, but I don’t want to discourage it because it can also be funny and entertaining. But more importantly it is tapping into their creativity. I assume that this is the intended effects of all the music we played for the kids when they were babies. Hearing them take in, interpret, and then make their own versions of the music they hear is development happening right before my ears. I just wish the little Jean Valjeans would develop some harmony.

The only thing worse than one of them belting out a mix of noises and mispronounced lyrics is when we’ve got one kid seeing how long they can sustain the same noise, one kid meandering their way through all the songs in the Aladdin soundtrack, and one kid screaming because they want to be the only one singing. At this stage in their development, there is clearly a difference in liking music and being musical, and my kids sure do like music.