A long time ago, when my oldest was in kindergarten (so that makes it about fifteen years, to be exact) I served on the technology committee for the Catholic grade school she attended. I was in a meeting with the principal (a formidable nun who I swear is Lee Iacocca in a dress) and trying to evaluate the wisdom/sense/merits of installing what passed for a Net Nanny on the school’s computers.
To the horror of the rest of the technology committee, Sr. Iacocca didn’t want a Net Nanny. She felt that kids should live in the world and they should be monitored if they’re on a computer but if they see something odd/bizarre/gross/inappropriate a teacher or parent needs to step in and give them moral and social context.
True story: she asked me to demonstrate what would happen if I googled (or the early 90’s version of googling) the term ‘virgin mary.’ In a Catholic school that’s a not-unexpected scenario, so I dutifully typed it in. All the ‘hits’ were appropriately Virginny-Mary and Sr. Lee was disappointed because she wanted to prove and demonstrate her point: that a common, respectable search term might yield unsavory results. I remember her standing behind me in her habit commenting, “Damn. Need to see some porn!” under her breath.
So, I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about this.
Synopsis: former TV news producer and full-time mom laments the Kidz Bop series’ use of objectionable artists in (what I think is) their thoroughly annoying re-mixes of pop songs. (If you haven’t heard of this genre, think pop songs re-recorded by little kids.) It’s the predictable Justin Bieber pap but also includes the counterintuitive inclusions of Snoop Dogg, for example, who is known for being a paragon of middle-America values.
Hell, yeah.
The KB series edits out the lyrics and replaces them with innocuous ones. So now I don’t understand this woman’s problem. What else can you complain about other than the cloying sound of children singing “Nasty Girl”? (I don’t think that they actually recorded that song; I believe the epic use of the f-word in that song defies even the Keebler Elves at Kidz Bop)
The author’s concern? That if Snoop Dogg is on the KB album, the kids might want to watch his video, which makes almost everyone’s hair fall out.
OMG. Not that.
Sr. Iacocca is gonna be pissed. Like her, I believe in a little something called ‘parenting,’ which entails not plopping my eight-year-old in front of MTV. It entails saying ‘no’ when kids say, “Hey! That’s the guy who wrote the song that got parodied on Kidz Bop! Can we buy his album?” It entails explaining why we don’t use half the words or concepts we hear in Snoop Dogg songs in polite conversation, should any of those words cross the Parental Quarantine and strike our children’s virgin ear drums.
The world is a really scary place. People say all kinds of crap. They try to kill each other. Random crap happens, too. There are germs, big scary horrible ones that make your skin fall off. As much as I’d like to hermetically seal my kids and protect them from all that, it’s impractical. While I don’t endorse seeking out and marinating the kids in all that junk, successfully shielding them from everything won’t complete my own Job One: giving the kids a solid context for viewing the world and preparing them for living in it.
© E.S. Evans 2010
Mom, Interrupted 
I saw your comment on my article and was naturally interested in the blog address you promoted. I’d clear up something simple, first off. I’m not sure how reading a 1,000 word article leaves you with any indication, really, of what kind of a mom I am. I do actually spend most of my waking (and many sleeping) hours parenting. Truly, it’s impossible to get a person’s real feelings or parenting perspective from a short article like that one.
So, my “problem” is that while some of the lines get cleaned up along the way, there are themes through the songs that aren’t appropriate for kids. Listen for yourself. It’s not necessarily the words, but the innuendo. I don’t buy Kidz Bop because the kids singing are pretty awful. I like the real deal. But I’m also not rushing off to put those songs on my kids’ iPods. We listen to plenty of current music along with myriad other genres.
The bottom line of my article is just that parents, music artists, Hollywood, whoever, are all too quick to turn our children into adults. I’m sure it’s all about the money – this will be the next generation with cash to spend. Maybe we are trying to get the same point across from different directions. I’m not about to hermetically seal my kids off from society either. But I also don’t have to give them a Lady Gaga handbook in order to prepare them for living in this world.
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First off, thank you very much for taking the time to comment.
Second, I would never presume that I could take your full measure as a parent from one post. It’s impossible to really know a parent’s style unless you’re that parent’s kid, but this was certainly not the first article of yours I’ve read.
So I get your overall drift. I also get that there are themes through the songs that aren’t appropriate for kids. But you know what? There’s precious little in life that DOES have a theme that’s appropriate for kids. The news alone will kill anyone’s childhood, as anyone who tried to listen to the morning shows during the Lewinsky era can attest. I’m trying to run through every song in my iPod looking for one song that I like that isn’t too grown up for a seven year old and I can’t find one…even the so-called innocent ones from the the sixties are covering dating and making out and did you know that the Hollies standard “Go All the Way” is labeled as explicit on iTunes? The classic “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” by Dusty Springfield is a great song to sing along to but is just an atrocious ode to being a man’s doormat.
I thought all day about your statement about how we’re all too quick to turn our children into adults. I thought about my own childhood in what most would call the ‘good old days,’ where adults and kids were neatly divided into who listened to Perry Como and who listened to the Beatles, and concluded: any kid who was paying attention was exposed to themes that were probably what you’d call inappropriate. As was any kid who paid attention in the forties and the atrocities of war (my mom can tell you about listening to the horrors of the Bataan Death March that she heard described on the radio when she was just twelve).
It’s not about spending cash, or at least, not *just* about the cash. It’s about spending time. I spend a whole lot more time with my kids than my parents spent with me. I refuse to segment my life (which is pretty much PG, for the most part) into kids/no kids. We discuss the news we hear together. We watch TV together and discuss the issues raised in the shows. I can’t imagine not listening to John Stewart’s “July, You’re a Woman” while I’m driving just because my young daughters happened to be in the backseat.
I’m not handing anyone a Lady Gaga handbook; I just figured that I’d take my kids with me through my life, holding their hands while we experienced this stuff together. And then, when they got closer to being adults themselves, I’d just let go of their hands altogether.
I’ve probably exposed all four of ’em to way more than you would think appropriate, but so far, and knock on wood, that appears to be working.
But I think all of us agree on one thing: for whatever reason, Kidz Bop has got to go.