Is It Okay to Take a Young Child to a Concert?

My experience of Pink with our six year old.

Are you a bad parent if you take your kid to a late night music concert? It’s what one dad tried to argue in a US court when his ex-wife took their 11 year old to see Pink. But fresh from seeing her ‘Summer Carnival’ with my daughter I feel the opposite.

In our case this was an outing in lieu of a birthday party, tickets I’d bought excitedly a year ago but in the lead up started to worry I’d made a mistake. I feared there would be a lot of swearing or inappropriate themes our daughter would latch on to, that I was taking her into an adults only atmosphere.

Instead our six year old marvelled at every moment of the circus-like spectacle until she fell asleep three quarters of the way through, but she was in good company. Beside us a joyously bopping grandma and young mum with a daughter also asleep in her lap.

We bumped into mums and daughters everywhere we went in the stadium; from the entrance queue, to the toilet line, and merchandise stand and it made us feel part of something powerful. A forceful female collective there to witness living proof women can have it all, as long as we unapologetically carve out a life on our own terms.

Where Pink’s music was once symbolic of teenage rebellion, now aged 44 with two children of her own, she seems to have touched a nerve with rule fatigued post-lockdown mums who want to parent the way they want.

On the night this was demonstrated best when Pink’s 12 year old daughter came onstage to sing their chart-topping lockdown anthem ‘Cover Me in Sunshine’ sporting a freshly shaved head.

Pink admitted to the crowd she had been nervous when Willow asked her to clipper it two days prior, but then backed her child saying, “Wave that flag people, don’t let other people tell you who you could be.”

As for that court case in America? The dad lost. In a 37-page decision Judge Lawrence R. Jones said, “When all the smoke from the custody litigation clears, it will be self-evident that all which happened here is that a young girl went to her first rock concert with her mother and had a really great time.”

As printed in Village Voice March 2024