Challenging Children with Art: Beyond Age Appropriateness
Following on from my recent blog about taking Alex to the opera, I wanted to explore the idea of challenging children artistically, intellectually, and culturally from an early age. This has been on my mind for three reasons:
My experience with Alex and the ways babies process sound and music.
Harry’s frustrations with the limitations of early reading in school.
A recent Desert Island Discs episode with Nick Cave, where he spoke about his father’s approach to exposing him to literature.
Early Exposure to Music and the Limits of Cultural Framing
When Alex was a baby, his mum and I read a lot about how infants process early sounds and musicality. Studies suggest that from birth, children begin to absorb the musical structures of the culture they are raised in. This is known as enculturation, where the brain becomes attuned to the scales, rhythms, and harmonies it hears most often.
For example, in the UK, children are primarily exposed to the Western diatonic scale, forming their foundation of what sounds "correct." By contrast, in other cultures, babies hear different tonal systems, such as microtonal scales in Arabic or Indian classical music which shape their perception of music.
Alex's mum is Latvian, and although Latvian music is also rooted in Western diatonic traditions, it has its own unique characteristics. Traditional Latvian folk music frequently favours the first five notes of the diatonic scale in its melodies, making the music feel grounded and simple yet deeply expressive. Additionally, there is a distinct favouring of low drones and lower-pitched female voices, which gives Latvian music a rich, resonant depth. These elements are deeply and subconsciously enmeshed in her musical brain and language, shaped by her upbringing, just as Alex's musical world is now being shaped by his early experiences.
Research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that while infants can initially detect and process a wide range of musical patterns from all over the world, by the age of one, their brains begin specialising in the music of their own culture.1 This means that the musical exposure we give children in their early years has a profound impact on their auditory development.
This raises an important question: if children can process and learn a wide range of musical structures from birth, why do we so often limit them to the simplest forms of music? Why not introduce them to opera, jazz, or avant-garde composition as early as possible? Just as we don’t only speak to babies in three-word sentences, we shouldn’t assume they need to be spoon-fed only the most basic music.
The Importance of Challenge in Early Reading
This leads me to Alex's brother Harry. From an early age, he has been read to regularly, and before starting school, we were enjoying chapter books together. Now that he is in reception, he is encountering a frustrating divide: the books he reads for school homework are designed to build phonics skills but offer little intellectual stimulation. While I understand the pedagogical reasoning behind structured reading schemes, they often fail to engage children who already have a strong interest in stories.
Instead of relying solely on school books, we started incorporating our own reading challenges at home. While he practises phonics with the school texts, we also worked together to sound out words in the books we’ve always enjoyed... books that actually interest him. The result? He is growing in confidence and discovering that he can decode real literature, not just school-sanctioned reading material.
This is an important reminder that early years education must account for the huge range of abilities in young children. Some children will be encountering structured reading for the first time, while others—like Harry—will already have an advanced vocabulary and understanding of narrative. The risk of a one-size-fits-all approach is that we can end up stifling curiosity instead of nurturing it. Research from the National Literacy Trust suggests that when children are genuinely engaged in the material they read, their literacy skills develop more quickly.2 The best approach isn’t to restrict challenging material but to support children in engaging with it at their own pace.
Nick Cave and the Power of Not Dumbing Things Down
Recently, I listened to Desert Island Discs, where Nick Cave spoke about his father, Colin Cave, an English teacher who encouraged him to engage with literature beyond his years. Rather than shielding him from complex themes, he challenged him and often replaced pulp novels with more sophisticated literature. Cave recalls how his father swapped out a crime thriller for Coriolanus, and even allowed him to read Lolita at 11, engaging him in open discussions about its difficult themes.
This approach aligns with the philosophy of many educators and psychologists who argue that children benefit from exposure to complex ideas, provided they have the opportunity to discuss them. Shielding children from difficult themes doesn’t protect them; it simply leaves them unequipped to process them when they inevitably encounter them later.
Professor Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist, has written extensively on how children learn through exposure to complexity. In The Gardener and the Carpenter, she argues that we should treat childhood learning as an expansive process—providing a rich, complex intellectual environment rather than artificially controlling exposure to difficult subjects.3 Children are natural meaning-makers. They want to engage with big ideas, and our role as adults is to guide them through that engagement rather than filtering out anything "too difficult."
A More Expansive Approach to Art and Literature
Whether it’s music, reading, or storytelling, the key takeaway is this: we don’t need to limit children to what is deemed "age-appropriate" in the narrowest sense. The more we challenge them through varied musical exposure, deeper literature, or difficult themes then the better prepared they will be to navigate the world.
This isn’t about forcing high art onto children; it’s about expanding their horizons, trusting their capacity for curiosity, and giving them space to engage with complexity on their own terms. If a child can find joy in Shakespeare, opera, or philosophical questions at five, why should we hold them back? Instead of assuming children can’t handle certain ideas, let’s assume they can and support them in the journey.
Perani, Daniela, et al. "Functional specializations for music processing in the human newborn brain." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 107, no. 10, 2010, pp. 4758-4763↩
National Literacy Trust. "Children and young people's reading in 2024." National Literacy Trust, 2024↩
Gopnik, Alison. "The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children." Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016↩