Reality Bites – When Your Kid Isn’t As Talented As She Thought
4 mins read

Reality Bites – When Your Kid Isn’t As Talented As She Thought

We watch a lot of reality talent shows in our house.  The X Factor, American Idol, The Voice, America’s Got Talent…our Tivo is filled with people from small towns who have big dreams.

Mostly, my daughter has driven the initiative on this front; she loves to sing, and fully believes that she will be the next American Idol…as soon as she’s old enough to audition (and assuming the show is still on the air by then; a point I haven’t had the heart to make with her quite yet).

My daughter has a lovely voice.  She does this thing where she makes herself sound a little twangy, sort of like a countrified version of Adele, which gives her what a reality competition judge might call “interesting,” or “unique.”  She takes voice lessons where she learns to sing from her belly, to enunciate her words, to keep her chin down when she sings high notes and to lose the nasal-ness.  She performed in the school musical and also in the musicals at her camp.  Once a quarter, her school has an open talent show where students can perform in front of the whole student body, and she always sings, usually an Adele song.  The first grade girls treat her like a rock star.

I’ve always marveled at those people who go on Idol or any of these other shows, and are always shocked to be told that they’re just not very good.  They cry and get angry and swear that everyone in their school/church/family thinks that they’re amazing and that the judges are just idiots.  And I always wonder why nobody has ever sat these people down and been like, you know sweetie, you’re not totally tone deaf, which makes you good compared to most of the people in your school/church/family, but you’re not really that good.

But now that I have a daughter who loves to sing, and whose eyes get so big when she watches these shows that you can practically see the Hollywood sign reflected in them…well, you can see where I’m going with this.  And I get it now.  I get that nobody wants to be the mom who kills her kid’s self confidence and dashes all of her dreams.  I mean, if Randy Jackson and J. Lo can do the dirty work for you, why not just let them, even if it does mean having your kid be humiliated on national television?

A few months ago, my daughter was practicing the night before one of those talent shows at school.  She was planning to sing Set Fire to the Rain, by, obviously, Adele.  The twangy thing was making it so I couldn’t understand half of what she was saying, and she sounded particularly nasal and she couldn’t quite hit some of the highest notes.

I told her all of these things in the nicest way, but after three more tries, she still wasn’t enunciating enough or singing from her belly enough.  So I videotaped her singing the song and then let her watch it back, so she could hear it for herself.  Sort of like she was watching an Idol audition on TV.  She sat down with a huge smile on her face, but as the song went on the smile lessened, until it was over, and she actually frowned.

“I’m so much better in my head,” she announced.  “I stink.”  I patted her on the hand.  “You don’t stink sweetie,” I told her.  “You just keep on practicing.”

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