Heavy Metal Boy

My six-year-old loves heavy metal. I didn’t plan this in any kind of way, but it’s…well frankly, it’s wonderful.

Sharing Hobbies

I read a story a while ago about a dad who really struggled that their child didn’t share their love of cycling, and instead preferred football. It was all round a sad tale, because ultimately the father thought that the child should adopt his hobby, rather than him adopting the child’s.

I read it and vowed to get into whatever my children got into - I don’t really ‘get’ cars but if that was the thing, then I hoped I’d be right there alongside my son. For a time, he loved tractors and I thought I’d have to get into farming. I asked the local farmer how to help children who want to farm. We took him to Tractorfest and Diggerland.

As he got older, tractors got relegated in favour of fighting, power rangers, and currently, How to Train your Dragon.

Metal Music

I got into Iron Maiden as a teenager, and that acted as the perfect gateway drug to the cornucopia of metal and metal-adjacent acts. I’ve nearly lost my eyebrows on the front row at Rammstein, and scored backstage passes to Dragonforce, and waited for 8 hours in the freezing cold to make sure we could reach out and touch Iron Maiden.

When my eldest was a baby and I needed to get him to sleep, I’d dance around the living room listening to System of a Down and shushing him. I don’t know that he loved the music, but the noise and the movement was enough to get his eyes shut.

Most mornings we have breakfast together and I put on music - whatever I feel like at the time. With it being morning, often that’s something relaxing (Grieg’s Morning Mood, obviously). Sometimes when I’m feeling especially joyful it’s “Wake Up” by the Boo Radleys. And apparently, sometimes, it’s Sabaton.

Rediscovery

Sabaton were a relatively new discovery for me. I’d seen them support Dragonforce in 2006, and had otherwise forgotten about them until a winter walk through Oxford where I just fancied some power metal and they came on and hit exactly the right spot. I walked and walked and listened and I was hooked on ‘new’ music in a way I hadn’t been in years.

Clearly, when I got home I must have played them a bit because now they’re my eldest’s favourite band and he listens to them on repeat whenever he can.

Sometimes I feel like I’m living with a teenager before his time - he’ll run upstairs, slam his door and stick power metal on to drown out his mum and I. But honestly, it’s wonderful.

With kids, though, unbridled joy and disaster are never far apart and so I’m always interested in where our disasters are going to come from and how to navigate them…

Finding Problems in the Joy

He loves battles and history and fighting. Sabaton is exactly that. Deeply, powerfully, that.

Mainly, this just gives me unbridled joy, but sometimes I do worry. I worry that the other parents will think that I’ve forced him into this to validate my own taste. To make him ‘unique’. Why couldn’t I just give him age-appropriate music? Because I want people to think I’m a quirky parent.

Yuk.

Sometimes I wonder whether it’ll be harder to connect with my other children because I clearly do have a passion for metal music, and it’s clearly very easy to share that passion with one of my children. What if the others take up something that I find interminable? How can I treat them equally?

This is a harder one, and I don’t really think I’ve felt the pain of this yet. As the other two get older and start to develop real passions of their own, I might have to revisit how I’m treating them. Ultimately I think that the right answer is to throw myself wholly into whatever hobby they have, so that I understand what they see in it. But I also think that that sounds pretty intense, and maybe a little overbearing. Kids are hard :)

Finally, what happens if/when he falls out of love with metal and picks up something else? Will I be disappointed if he decides Sabaton are deeply uncool (if your dad likes them, that sounds pretty uncool!) and actually Harry Styles is his musical BFF? Honestly, probably yes.

I’ll need to be careful to handle that well - not to lie, but also to not make a big deal of it and to let him know that he’s free to love whatever he wants and it won’t change things between us. And then, to make sure that’s true.

Acknowledging the Joy

Sure, maybe there are problems down the line. But for now, I have a hobby and my six-year-old shares that hobby. So we drove to Tae-Kwon-Do class today listening to Metallica’s One, while I tried to explain a little about the history of the song and he tried to explain about the history of the Crimean War.

Rock on, little man. I can’t wait to watch you discover all the masters of metal. Rock on.