Peter responded to my previous post on giving Daughter a cordless headphones.
Our variation on this theme involves providing Oliver with access to podcasts or music to listen to while he’s going to sleep.
comment by Peter on The unexpected perk of going cordless
He then describes four variations for Oliver to be able to play music in his room. Peter’s response reminds me that I’m still looking for a good solution to giving Daughter more autonomy in her own ‘listening behavior’. At some point in the near future I want her to be able to decide to listen to music or audio stories for herself, without having to ask me or her dad for permission.
The thing is, my household has digitized music to such an amount that it’s only accessible through a mobile phone or a computer. We have Sonos speakers in the house and through the Sonos app, we either start radio, our digitized CD collection or Spotify streams. I don’t allow Daughter access to my phone without my supervision, and will keep it that way for ever. She will one day have her own phone, but that will be in the distant future. But when it comes to listening to music or audio stories I don’t want to restrain her. I want her to explore this stuff without parental supervision.
When I was her age, we still lived in Compact Cassette-land (CD’s came in my teens). I had access to tapes with kids’ stories and music that sat in a cupboard and could get them out and play them all by myself. I remember clearly how I listened to folk tales in my own room, or to audio recordings of my favorite tv-show.
How do young kids these days know what is available to them without a physical presence in the home? Of course I introduced Daughter to some kids music (that made it through my filter), so she knows there is music available ‘out there’, but how do I give a three year old access to her stories and music albums whenever she wants to without giving her access to a device that can do too much?
When Oliver was just a little older than [your] Daughter, we were planning a family tree to Copenhagen and so, as he couldn’t type yet, I created a set of Danish child-focused website bookmarks in Firefox for him.
He quickly tired of these and, through a process of trial and error, discovered that he could drag the bookmarks into the Firefox search bar, and Firefox would return a list of related sites. Which tended to also be Danish child-focused websites.
He hacked the system. I have never been prouder!
That is hilarious. And another reminder that kids, no matter their age, will find their way online. I’ll never forget my then four-year old niece seamlessly navigating to the Disney website (early 00’s) without being able to read.