ABSTRACT
This conclusion reasserts the book’s main themes; recorded music for children can take many musical forms and cover many subjects; it exposes the distance between the symbolic and the social child; the musical construction of childhood is complex, fluid and unpredictable. This chapter highlights how assumptions of ‘the family’ and ‘the child’ come bundled with normalised ideals of race, gender, age, education, sexuality and experience which serve to narrow the diversity of the representations of childhood in the recordings. I summarise the findings of previous chapters. The enduring bond between folk music and childhood has been forged by tropes of simplicity, authenticity and purity drawn from similar specious origin myths. Woody Guthrie’s 400+ songs for children combine the prosaic machinations of home, family and community life with profound universal themes. The BBC’s radio programming for children corresponded to fluctuations in the corporation’s conceptions of the child and the family. The albums of Sesame Street reveal changes in pedagogical emphasis which correspond to fluctuations in the use of musical genres. Music on television in the 1970s communicated weighty and potentially contentious messages to children and families. Children’s music artists have responded in different ways to changes in technology and funding.
