Buy your child an instrument

And a bit about Aristotle

In nearly every room of my home, you can find two things: books and instruments. Some of these are very nice, and they’re kept in special places: a corner of our living room for my wife’s piano, a particular shelf for a few first-edition books, and so on. Others, like a paperback I might be thumbing through for research or a spare shaker, are kept wherever they happen to be put down.

This means that my son, now nearing two years old, can’t escape the presence of books and music. So it is no surprise that we’re regularly up for an extra hour at night to read to him, as he keeps demanding more books.¹ It’s also no surprise that he is in love with music. He regularly wants to get our guitars down from the walls where they hang, and when we wakes up in the morning he will often request music by loudly pointing at some bookshelf speakers.

This is one of his favorite songs. He likes the beat — it makes him want to dance.

A few weeks ago, my son decided that he didn’t just want us to play the guitar. He wanted to play as well. This presents some immediate challenges. He has a knack for dragging, dropping, and throwing (he is, after all, a toddler). When we remind him to be gentle, he looks at us like we’re from Mars. On top of that, guitars aren’t well-suited for toddlers. They’re too big to be much fun.

My wife had the idea to buy something toddler-sized for him. We settled on a ukulele, a model that was designed and marketed for use in elementary schools. He calls it his guitar. Now, he grabs it whenever I’m playing the guitar. He grabs it when my wife plays the piano, too. He strums along – a little too violently, still – and you can see real joy in his eyes. Occasionally, he wants to bring his ukulele to bed with him. I did the same, actually, when I first starting playing guitar. I was so in love with the thing that I would play it in bed, trying to write songs, and I’d fall asleep with it still in my hands.²

You can see he bears a striking resemblance to his father.

Last year, we read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics together. I won’t rehearse the details of the text here — it’s something that you should go back and review on your own, if that sounds like your idea of a good time. But as I saw my son take to music in such an enthusiastic way, a theme from Aristotle came to mind.

We are mimetic creatures. We form ourselves, including our desires, by imitating others. This is especially clear when you have a small child. While they do bring their own personalities with them, seemingly straight from the womb, it is awesome just how much they are shaped by their environments. I have a son who loves music because he has parents who love music, and we transmitted that love by example. We played and sang when he was small, and we never stopped. And when he expressed an interest in music, we encouraged it — not by immediately looking for lessons or a how-to manual for toddler music, but by giving him something that he could experiment with. He’s learning by doing, and what he’s doing is imitating us.

For Aristotle, this means that we cannot become good through the acquisition of knowledge. Similarly, we cannot come to love something by learning about its desirably properties. We have to be habituated in the right sort of way.

It is commonly thought that Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is named for his son Nicomachus. Throughout the work, Aristotle does seem especially concerned with education and child-rearing. The theoretical aspects of the Nicomachean Ethics are all in service of this broader project of becoming good; this is true for us, but it is true for those we have the privilege of raising as well.

Source

I try not to generalize too much from my own experience as a father. I’ve only been doing this for a few years, and I’ve only had one child so far. More experience and examples are needed to draw meaningful generalizations. But in this case, I think the conclusion is safe enough, even on such meager grounds: if you want your kid to love music, buy them an instrument.

1. ‘We’ is used loosely here. My son decided about two months ago that I should be around for the beginning of the bedtime ritual, but now after a bath, a quick family prayer, and a book he grabs my hand and leads me out of the room. The rest of storytime is exclusively for him and his mom.

2. I’m not an especially skillful player, but a grad school roommate once remarked that she had ‘never seen someone so comfortable with a guitar in their hands.’ She likely should just look at better players; still, it felt good to hear.