My son just got a CD player for his 4th birthday. He really enjoys playing DJ on it, but CDs are just way too prone to failure; we’re trying to teach him not to get fingerprints etc on the data side, but it’s a vain effort, and we’re having to clean his CDs multiple times per day resulting in permanent damage. CDs are just not the right technology for a kid his age.
An MP3 player would seem to be a better choice, but he really enjoys the experience of selecting the CD and placing it in the player; I don’t think a digital display for selecting the music would work as well, though I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.
Does anyone know of a music player that might suit our needs
If it’s selecting the CDs that he enjoys, why not just rip his CDs to your computer, buy a stack of writable CDs (they’re dirt cheap these days) and give him those instead of the original? When he wrecks one, give him a new copy (while continuing to instill proper CD care, of course). With MP3s, you could fit a lot more than one album’s worth of music on one CD.
Mine liked her tapes and tape player. They are a lot less easy to destroy.
Tape players are cheap. Hers was like five bucks at a Family Dollar store. Of course it depends on what he likes to hear, but my four year old is very happy with my old Rush tapes.
I got her a CD player recently. I think I paid thirty bucks for it. She broke the cover off in two days.
My kid gets her dirty CDs back (cleaned) tomorrow. Or maybe the next day. Or maybe next week. Took her about three days to stop getting peanut butter fingerprints on them when all her favorites were out of commission.
4 is certainly not too young to take proper care of CDs.
OMG! I used to love my little Fisher-Price record player!
Sadly, they no longer make them. Now they have pretend “CD players” which are fully digitized, only a plastic (not containing actual files) disc sits in there, pressing one of four buttons to tell the “player” which “CD” is inside. The button, of course, signals the player to play the corresponding file, which is saved on the player, not the “CD”.
Good for little little ones, but if I had to listen to those four “discs” all the time, I’d kill myself. I’d rather get her some Beatles and They Might Be Giants CDs and a real CD player!
Just get the cheapest CD player your local CVS drugstore sells. Your four-year-old will show an almost scary facility with your PC or laptop soon enough.
Totally agree with this, it’s pretty much what I did with my son though he never got peanut butter on the CDs :eek:.
My son is five, he has his CD/tape player (wal-mart special) and listens to his CDs and tapes which belonged to me when I was his age (mostly mixed of Robert Munsch, Sharon Lois and Bram, Raffi and Fred Penner). He still gets the odd fingerprint on the CDs but nothing that I don’t put on my own from time to time when in the car.
Absent the Fisher Price player cited earlier, this Disney Princess thing is exactly what I’m looking for [though I personally hope they have a more tolerable selection of music available…]. I realize I could train him to be gentler with the CDs but I prefer to avoid battles like this – it’s supposed to be for fun, not a chance for yet another lesson in responsibility.
The problem I see with the MP3 Player model is that the kids don’t really get to pick their favorites, the way they can with CD’s (or tapes or LPs). Unless they’re reading, of course. About 9/10 of why my daughter loves her music is that it’s HER music. I control the library, of course, but she gets to listen to her choice from that library. With an MP3 player, she couldn’t choose her favorite albums because she can’t read the display.
I’d forgotten about this one. I was going to suggest a cheap record player, found for a few dollars at a thrift store, along with a stack of Disneyland records. It worked for me when I was a kid. The records were all scratched up, but they still played.
