I remember this in Snow Crash (1992): paraphrased, "These kids have never heard music that isn't perfect. It's either studio-perfect or arena-show-perfect."

My high school put on a musical every year so I saw one every year from 1st grade on. I still think musicals suck (Urinetown excepted). I have trouble understanding why Dear Evan Hansen is a thing people pay to see and have stopped agreeing to see things my wife suggests without googling first. Hamilton wasn't bad, I guess.

Maybe I should have seen in New York instead of Toronto?

We watched a charming but very stupid high school play this weekend. It was a play-within-a-play and the point was to watch the delivery of the murder-mystery go ludicrously off the rails. By the end, the set is falling apart, and half the main characters have been inadvertently knocked unconscious and are replaced with monotonic stagehands reading from the script.

The kids loved it way more than I loved Broadway when I was their age, though. Right now they all think that plays are a blast, which is what seeded the OP in my mind.

You're the youngest of a pretty spread out bunch of siblings -- were you maybe getting systematically dragged along to things you were way too young for, and your kids are a tighter group so when you take them to things they're plausibly more age appropriate?

I think the peak of human achievement in theater is the stage version of "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus."

6: Possibly? My oldest brother is 6 1/2 years older than me. (Ours span 5 1/2). I think my parents also just plain thought it was good for us. Off the top of my head, I remember seeing Gypsy and 42nd street and just an ungodly amount of ballet.

I'm 5 years and 10 months older than my youngest sister (with two in between us). My poor mother had so much calcium sucked out of her that she broke her foot during the last pregnancy on a stumble of a few inches.

Oh, huh, my memory was off. I was thinking you and your brothers were a bigger gap.

Is it important to have kids appreciate the skill that goes into a piece of art, specifically?

For instance, I can see that a lot of skill goes into ballet and opera, but I find those things boring as an adult, and I did when I was a kid too.

Some things are going to be beautiful or interesting in a way that a given kid can grasp; others not so much. I think that has more to do with whether they're relevant to the kid, or whether the kid has enough contextual knowledge to understand what they're seeing.

We've taken xelA to the ballet once. He was 5, I think. Just to make matters worse, we took a photo of him having his first sushi, when he was on the way to that ballet, and stuck it on Facebook to troll my family. He quite enjoyed the ballet, but the sushi is the thing that stuck. He's a fiend for all things edible and Japanese.

I think the only time I went to the theatre, until I was an adult and able to pay my own way, was when the school took us for the annual trip to see something at the King's in Glasgow, or at the MacRobert centre. My family had neither the money or the inclination to go and see musicals, plays or ballets.

We, my wife and I, are not especially big theatre goers. We did used to go and see a fair bit of Shakespeare, and for years saw most things, most seasons, at the Globe. xelA has seen, and liked, some Shakespeare on TV, but we've not tried to take him, yet. I like musicals, but I like musicals specifically in the mid-20th century form of a _movie_ with Gene Kelly, or whoever. The idea of going to see one in the West End fills me with horror. My wife has taken xelA to see School of Rock (he's also a fiend for AC/DC) but I didn't go.

Specifically, on the theory in the OP, I'm not sure. Kids are super impressed by things like athletic excellence, acrobatics, dancing, instrumental virtuosity, etc. So I don't know if the accessibility vs difficulty thing really holds.

I think kids pick up on things their parents genuinely like, though. xelA sometimes chooses, without being prompted, to go and listen to records* you might not expect an 8 year old to like and genuinely enjoys them, and he's picked that up from both my wife, and from me. I think if either of us were really into ballet, he'd probably have picked that up, too.

* Miles Davis, PJ Harvey, various classical things like Prokofiev, various bits of swing music, etc. He's big into Wolf Alice at the moment.

Kids are super impressed by things like athletic excellence, acrobatics, dancing, instrumental virtuosity, etc.

True! But at age 8, are they meaningfully more impressed by Usain Bolt vs the fastest kid in the high school?

I think kids pick up on things their parents genuinely like, though.

I never did pick up a taste for ballet.

re: 14.last

Yeah. There's definitely stuff we like, that he doesn't, and I imagine that'll get more apparent the older he gets. But I think they do pick up on stuff that other people like, at least enough to entertain it enough to work out if they like it or not.

Yeah I'm not sure if knowing the skill needed to do something is necessary.

I loved watching classical music when I was a kid. The local SO had kids programs that would come to schools and my dad's work sponsored other kids' focus concerts (often ones that involved humour and humourous failure and getting to see 'behind the scenes' - maybe that's it?). I loved it so much I pressed my parents to sign me up for violin lessons in grade 1. I played for 10 years and mostly enjoyed it.

On the other hand, I begged my parents for ballet lessons because I loved watching them too (via tv) and dropped out after 6 months because I didn't get to go on pointe shoes. I was also in grade 1 for this.

In both cases I had no idea how much work went into something I loved. Was the NSSO crappy enough? They were actually pretty well regarded then (maybe still?).

I was quite ignorant of how much work went into anything though. It took me until university to realize people weren't just born good writers. That one I wish my teachers had made explicit. That writing was work and that I could learn it.

I always hated plays and musicals though! Maybe I'm just a philistine.

The concept of a Goldilocks zone is relevant to lots of things - planetology and basically any kind of education, mainly - but maybe not to cultivated aesthetic tastes. Forget about esoteric stuff like theater for a minute, do you really think the average pro sports fan is just a little bit behind the ability level of the pro athletes they watch?

I had a godmother and distant cousin who ran a ballet school; her husband (eventually) was principal dancer with a series of prestigious companies. He said that she had told him many years before, "Ballet is basically about sex. If you don't grasp that, you won't get a lot out of it."

I can't say I was entirely converted, but it made a lot more sense in that light.

That's why the Nutcracker always was creepy.

Hadn't thought about it in terms of art, but when Steady was younger, I really tried not to escalate past his sense of excitement. If a city park would blow his mind, I tried to never take him anywhere bigger (Disneyland). I was trying to keep stuff in reserve. Also, I never want to go to Disneyland. Which will be fine; Steady's dad is game to take him.

I totally agree with 20. Although I can't say we've abided by it but I totally agree.

(It drives me very crazy that my in-laws go so overboard with Christmas presents. You don't need a literal mountain of presents in order for kids to get that excited feeling of bounty.)

I am also not very committed to the stance in the OP. There seem to be a lot of counter-examples.

It's very possible that I enjoy sports and musicals so little that I assume the only angle is to admire the people doing it.

I do like looking at art in museums now, though. Although I find the slow amble and standing still to be weirdly tiring. I still maintain that standing is more tiring than walking.

13 xelA sounds awesome

23.last is right.

This whole take is alien to me: I want to introduce the perspective that talented people can make shitty art (and even vice versa)--we're not required to take pleasure regardless of how impressive somebody's CV is.....

Ballet is all about sex. The Nutcracker is about a girl's sexual awakening. I saw the Nutcracker as a child, and I didn't pick up on that, but I missed a lot of the sex stuff at that age. It's hard to miss as an adult. I always liked plays. They were just movies without all the clever camera angles and film editing. You had to choose what to watch and hear for yourself. My parents took me to a few plays on Broadway, to Startford on Avon, and to a number of small scale productions. I was Jewish, so this included a Purim pantomime. The actors had a receiving line after the play. I was probably six, but I knew enough to be polite to the guy playing Haman even if I had blasted him with a noisemaker whenever he appeared on stage.

A lot of what one appreciates is idiosyncratic. I still don't get music or sports, but I can appreciate the serious talent involved.

I don't think there is a magical Goldilocks zone. Maybe it's because I grew up in New York, and there were lots of people in the arts world. My father did taxes for authors and musicians. He felt that that homosexuals should be able tot get married and file a joint return. A friend of mine's parents were both violinists for major orchestras. I knew that some real people could develop their talents in ways I probably couldn't. One problem is that kids are a lot more siloed nowadays. They aren't expected to be able to interact with adults in the adult world. They only read books or see videos that include people like themselves, so they don't know how people grew up, what they overcame, what drove them and so on.

27-Yep, and not just kids are siloed: YA culture has basically gobbled up most people under 40 by now...

What is "YA culture"?

re: 29

Young adult. It's a huge market in fiction.

Ballet is all about sex.

That was made very obvious to me in the one ballet production we took xelA to. It was a mildly bowdlerised children's production of Swan Lake, with English National Ballet. At one point the Black Swan did* a bourée en couru across the stage and turned so her back faced the audience. You could _literally_ hear the intake of breath from the "Dads" in the audience.

* I had to google the name for this

re: 24

He can be a grumpy little shit at times. But it's cool that he has his own very well-formed tastes in things, especially music and books. In terms of music, in particular, he has vastly more exposure to music and much cooler tastes than I ever did at his age.

as a couple of people have pointed out, the "two levels up" falls down completely when you think of sport. football's exhibit A in terms of watching Barca and kicking a ball around the playground, which might even explain its global triumph.

also 27, 32: it's definitely the tartiest thing I do on a regular basis:-)

Kids are super impressed by things like athletic excellence, acrobatics, dancing, instrumental virtuosity, etc.

This is not my recollection of my own childhood at all. I don't think I started appreciating excellence/virtuosity until my teens. The only possible exception I can think of is my early childhood fandom of the 49ers and Joe Montana, but that was more to do with them being on Channel 4 and so dominant at the time. I didn't have anything to compare them to. I was very much a reluctant museum/theatre/ballet goer and didn't really watch any other sports, let alone athletics, again until my teens, at which point I started following a pretty mediocre team.

I can see the case for the OP in things like demonstrating skills that the kid is trying to learn. Pebbles picks up a lot of physical skills (skiing, biking) from working from the assumption that if the Calabat can do it she damn well can too.

But it doesn't seem to hold for things treated as entertainment. That said, I think we're often poor judges of how hard excellence is. How many guys think they're like the pro football player because they were first string in high school?

11,090,456 +/- 56,890.

eh our kid fell éperdument amoureux de ballet at 3 & change, still adores dance although nowadays both in & out of the ballet box. it's down to the kid provided that the kid is swimming in a congenial cultural pool open to random eddies.

The thing about football -- in both the American and English senses -- is that the individual movements can be reasonably duplicated by kids. Not play after play, years on end, but any kid who can play at all can imagine a diving catch in the endzone, out leaping a defender to head the ball into the goal. If you can hit a pitched ball, you can imagine a home run, and if you can imagine a home run, you can imagine a walk-off home run in a decisive game of the playoffs.

It was great to watch OJ elude defenders, but he showed us what we all knew by running through the airport for that commercial -- most anyone could imagine themselves doing exactly this.

It was great to watch OJ elude defenders

And just as impressive the way he eluded prosecutors.

30 is great deadpan, but I really was curious whether the "culture" extends further than, say, thirtysomethings taking online Harry Potter quizzes.

I was still trying to figure out the best way to make the joke in 39. PF's is better.

I knew I had to act quickly.

OJ is interesting to me in this context. I wasn't a huge football fan as a kid, but I thought OJ was really special on the football field -- and I believe I understood contemporaneously what made him different.

I'm still learning to appreciate a lot of the other stuff we're discussing in this thread.

38.last: Hertz: Gets you to the airport with time to kill.

I saw that commercial when I was watching "Shazaam," starring Sinbad.

My mom keeps some art supplies in an old OJ Simpson Sneakers shoe box.

How come Ben and Jerry only named a non-dairy frozen dessert after Colin Kaepernick and not actual ice cream? I they mad about his kneeling?

They probably just figure vegans are the Wokest. Savvy marketing.