Kids and Classical Music

Posted by Count Almaviva.

I went to a small, free concert put on today by the music department, and for the third week in a row, a couple had brought their two young kids. It always struck me as weird that anyone would bring their children to a classical music concert, or really any concert. Considering that the role of the audience is to sit quietly, listen, and appreciate, children aren't usually capable of that. Of course, asking these kids to sit patiently for an hour is asking too much, so they frequently moved about and pestered their parents, distracting all of us.

Why would you bring your kids to a live performance? Isn't it obvious that they're not mature enough to understand it? If you're the kind of person who thinks that baby's benefit from the "Mozart Effect," you should know that the experiment people reference when making that claim was performed on college students, and still only showed a temporary effect. When I say temporary, I mean less than a half-hour. The scientists conducting that study never made the claim that listening to classical music can make you smarter. As a personal anecdote, I know a girl who was forced to listen to classical music as treatment for ADHD. It didn't work, and today she hates classical music. Lots of people can get into classical music without listening to it as young child; I'd even go so far as to say most people who like classical music weren't strongly exposed to it as children. Conversely, many people who were brought up on classical music care nothing about it. Whatever taste in music you have is just your taste. It doesn't say anything about your intelligence or reasoning capabilities.

The point I'm trying to make is that there's no reason to bring your children to a classical music performance unless they really want to go. To give the parents some credit, a small-time free concert is probably the best kind of performance to take your kids to if you really have to, since no one has paid to be there and the object of it is to have fun listening to music. I know when I hear whining kids in an expensive concert hall, it bugs the hell out of me because they really have no place there. Another point of credit, as far as kids go, they weren't that bad, and maybe they really did want to be there.