There Are No Vegan Children

Let's just get this one straight. There are no vegan children. There are no vegetarian children. No sugar-free diet children. No farm-to-table, locally-sourced-food-only children. There are only children from whom meat, dairy and sugar have been withheld. Get it? Understand?

I guess I'm just a stickler for accurate labeling. I get that the kid eats no beef. There's no misunderstanding there. It's the label I don't like. He isn't a vegetarian. That implies some kind of choice, some agency, some free will. A kid has no choice but to eat what mom and dad set down in front of him at dinnertime. If an inmate at Sing Sing, eating $5/day of food tried to boast that he was really on the SNAP Challenge, hoping to awaken America to the inadequacy of public food assistance, we'd all laugh. We'd laugh because it would be a fucking joke. Do you get me? You see my point?

A person with no say in the matter can't be called a Vegan. They are, to repeat myself, a person from whom non-Vegan foods have been compulsorily withheld. You can't call that unfortunate person a Vegan any more than you could call a starving African villager with no access to meat a Vegetarian. A person who is desperate for a little chicken but can't afford any is not a Vegetarian, and neither are your children.

Now here come the Vegan parents, ready to set me straight. "You couldn't be more wrong." they're saying in my imagination. "Little Sophia/Isabella/Emma came to ME and ASKED to be vegan. She was HORRIFIED by the idea of animal slaughter. She would WEEP bitter tears at the mere sight of a hamburger. I twisted nobody's arm. I am proud of my little Jayden/Mason/Connor/Langdon/Tate and his own initiative to be a strict vegan."

Great. Bravo for him. While he munches on a rice cake, let me introduce you to some more kids. Here's some kids who believe whites are the master race.
Here are a few that think God hates fags.
Here's one that thinks Jews are apes and pigs.

I guess what I'm saying here is, kids are... impressionable. If a kid grows up in a Vegan home, and is taught from the tenderest age that meat-eating is murder, then surprise! You end up with an eager Vegan cadet. You get a kid who can't wait to be Vegan. Am I supposed to be impressed? There's a reason we don't let kids vote, drive cars, get married, run for office. They've got tiny, immature brains.

We pity the kids in the videos I linked to above. We don't hold them accountable for their wackjob opinions. Why? Because they aren't really opinions. They're the result of a kid's ingrained need to absorb the truth from mom and dad. And so your child's desire to forgo cheeseburgers doesn't speak to their superior morality or maturity, it speaks merely to your successful indoctrination. You successfully got your kid to swear off cheeseburgers, even though any kid loves a cheeseburger. At least those KKK kids get a plate of ribs once in a while.   

There was this sad little girl I grew up with. She was a family friend. Her dad put her on a no-sugar or reduced-sugar diet. I'm not sure exactly what is was, but the part of it I saw was that she had to be carefully segregated and monitored at all the birthday parties. Her father's condition for her attendance at the party was that she get no sugar. And kids parties - in case you're unaware - are like sugary bacchanals. They are the one time when all dietary rules are relaxed and kids gorge themselves on sticky fistfuls of candy, cakes, sodas. And here was this girl, glum and miserable, being carefully shielded from the whole spread. Some of the parents would actually get angry. This was torture for the girl and everyone could see it. Maybe she had been persuaded at home that sugar was evil, but when you go to a party and see everyone else indulging with no ill effects, you're bound to question the faith. I picture her now, pushing 40, bone-skinny and having shrieking nightmares about cupcakes. What was the point of that regimen? Was it so the dad could boast he was raising a sugar-free family?

Adults can make choices. Kids parrot what they've been taught to say and eat what they're allowed to eat. They are no more Vegan than this kid is not cold and dead.

Six Year Old Virtuosos Don't Impress Me

A six year old boy or girl comes out on stage in formal attire, bows to applause, sits down at the piano, and proceeds to play some lightning-paced, dizzyingly complex, technically demanding sonata. She plays it flawlessly, finishes with the theatrical elevated hands on the final note, and rises to a rapturous ovation. The youtube video gets millions of hits, and the little tyke shows up on Ellen later that week saying that she plays piano because "I don't know, I like it."

This is a massive fraud. There is no such thing as a six year old virtuoso. I have a computer program that can play back sheet music when the sheet music is scanned in. Is my computer a virutoso? No. Neither is the kid. My computer's playback has perfect precision. It also can be tweaked with instructions for tempo and crescendo and such, so the playback won't sound entirely robotic. So why doesn't my computer get to play Carnegie Hall?

For the same reason that the kid also shouldn't get to. A computer executes instructions, without passion and without artistry. It has no life experience, it has no emotional maturity. It has no way to connect with the music on any level beyond the superficial. It can plumb no emotional depths. It can offer no fresh take, no intimacy, no playfullness or humor, and no pathos. It's a machine.

The six year old kid is flesh and blood, but he shares most of, if not all of these same deficiencies. The child can follow instructions and be a fine mimic, but is utterly incapable of real musicianship. Consider a piece like Wagner's prelude to Tristan. It's a work that uses the nonverbal language of music to communicate emotions of maddening, perpetually unfulfilled desire - a totally consuming desire for something just out of reach. It builds and builds until it the desire itself becomes a strange kind of ecstacy. The climax of the piece is practically sexual. The piece is written for orchestra, but Wagner wrote a perfectly servicable piano reduction. So let's sit the six year old virtuoso down in front of this piece, and try to coax a great performance out of him. It's impossible. The kid lacks the emotional knowledge and maturity to even begin to wrangle with Tristan's prelude. The kid, technical keyboard whiz that he might be, could certainly master all the notes. He might even, with careful coaching, learn how to mimic a great performance of the Prelude. But hey, so could my computer. As I said, it's a fraud.

Kids, surprise surprise, are good at learning things. Evolution equipped them well. A kid can learn 3 languages through mere exposure in the same time an adult would struggle to learn one. If you sit a kid of 3 or 4 down in front of a piano and embark upon a frustrating campaign to get him proficient, and you force him to submit involuntarily to a thousand hours of practice, and you persevere through his tantrums, you will end up with a six year old who can muscle his way through Prokofiev's Piano Sonata no.7. Hooray. But it doesn't mean he's a genius. It means you successfully shackled your toddler to a Yamaha. And when I say you made him submit involuntarily, I say it because, let me go out on a limb, six year olds generally have no interest in playing Prokofiev's piano sonata no.7. But the joke's on you, tiger mom, because the performer you've struggled so hard to create is simply a mimic. You've confused mimicry with artistry. I might go to a circus to see if the clown can juggle 10 plates without dropping any - that's the idea of plate juggling. But I don't go to the concert hall to see if the performer can get through the Prokofiev without making an error. I go to make some kind of intimate connection with the music. And I need a performer who is an appropriate conduit for the music. Someone who understands it and can tease out all its nuances while making the performance indelible and personal. And little Gunnar or Mason doesn't have those chops. But you don't get that do you? To you it's plate juggling. Good thing you forced him to sit on the piano bench for years while his friends were being creative and playing outdoors.

And that frankly is what I see when I see the six year old in the concert hall, sitting at the piano, legs dangling. I don't see a precocious prodigy, or a budding genius. I don't even see an artist. I see a kid who had the bad luck to be leg-ironed to a piano bench during years when his emotional and intellectual development would have been better served on a playground. I see a trained monkey.

Here's my advice to the tiger moms. Piano study (in moderation) is time well spent. We can agree there. But keep the music and the skill level age appropriate. This means playing children's ditties at age 6, not Rachmaninoff. By age 8 it can be a Mozart Minuet, by 10 the Sonata in C. This is not only easier music that doesn't demand hundreds of practice hours, but it's music that's emotionally accessible to the child. Training and study should of course include technique, sight reading, and all the other proteins of good musicianship, but it's also important to teach the theory of performance. Why do we perform? What does the artist bring to the music? What are we giving to the audience? This is the part that's entirely lacking in the normal tiger mom curriculum.

By the time the little squirt is 18, he/she would have the ability to handle the technically demanding stuff, but also would be mentally prepared for the real rigors of performance. The groundwork will have been properly laid.

Until then, spare me the youtube sensation, the talk show appearance, and the IQ score boast. You're not the proud parent of a gifted child, you're the confused parent of an unlucky child.