My son is obsessed with Music, obsessed.  It might be due to the fact that I used to put some Buddha Bar tunes for him to sleep between the ages of 1 to 3?  Or the fact that I’m also obsessed with music and must have them on all car drives?  Or my fascination with all things music videos?  Or his anxiety led behaviour of being overly compulsive with  musical trivia? – i.e. what year the song came out, how old was I when it came out – all useless information to me but very important for him; or a combination of all three, but a big part of his life is music.  Truth is, between his mother and I we love our music, albeit different genres.  He has become so obsessed that he would rather listen to music than play with his toys, or watch music videos instead of cartoons.  If we don’t have music in the car he gets agitated.

Is this normal?  Not sure but we’ve started to deal with it:

Firstly, I started exposing him to a range of music, from different time periods to different countries.  He’s a bi fan of Michael Jackson, knows a George Michael song when it comes on, loves Rasputin from Boney M and Funky Town is his comfort zone anthem.   Similarly, he loves Arabic/English fusion, into Brazilian and African pop, and started to get into French and Korean.  To add more variety, he loves Rock (more than we do), not a big fan of hip hop or anything rap though (extreme opposite of his mom), got into indie and house music.  He’s listened to classical Arabic music, Turkish, Iranian, Indian, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian pop (doesn’t faze him).

Then we started to get him into audio books, instead of music when he’s in the car.  At least it lessens his car music addiction once in a while.  We still crank the tunes out though on most car rides (I mean we love music too!).

Stopped serenading him with music at night, instead – and only occasionally – would put nature sounds for him at his request.  He loves sounds of the sea.

Music videos are a tough one – we’re still working on it, but we have cut down quiet a bit.  We will still occasionally indulge him with half hour of music videos once in a while, again we like music too, so it’s tough going cold turkey for all of us!

When he asks for dates and chronological info on each song, and which song came first, how old I was or my dad – all random questions to me (but I realised they are just part of him making logic out of everything he does) – I stopped answering every time.  It got to the point where we would barely hear the song because of all the questions and then the song is over.  Questions like what other songs did this singer sing?  Is this a happy or sad song?  Why is the song name such and such?  Really?! I’m sure it’s part of his compulsive nature but…. we want to hear the song.

Ultimately he could be into worse things.  Once in a while it’s nice to see him appreciate music like he does – he has musical ear and his dancing has got rhythm, but as we learned the expensive way – couldn’t play an instrument if his life depended on it (he does like beat boxing with his mouth though).  All I know is that when we went to the IMAX on Halloween to watch a movie, and they played Michael Jackson’s thriller on the big screen (in 3D) we all got goose bumps.  Even my son who was not part of the “MJ” generation.  That was a proud moment for me to see him appreciate it as much as we did – my Son of Music.