Who's your alternadaddy?

SMALL CHILDREN, BY instinct, are natural punk rockers. Their fearlessness, energy, mistrust of formality, and above all their talent for disruption make them the proper ambassadors for the principle first articulated by Johnny Rotten in 1976: "Don't know what I want but/ I know how to get it." As Neal Pollack observes in his highly enjoyable new memoir of fatherhood, "Alternadad" (Pantheon), "Kids are wild. They want anarchy, in the best way."

The question for parents like Pollack and me -- which is to say, almost middle-aged, ex-hipsterish fans of "alternative" music -- is this: Are we not insulting the sincerity of this anarchic impulse, its aboriginal propriety, when we force our little ones to actually listen to "Anarchy in the UK"? Or when we dress them up in miniature T-shirts that say "I Hate Coldplay" (available from punkrockbaby.com)? We've all done it, or something like it. Somewhere in my house, for example, is a photo of my son at the age of 18 months, wearing a Misfits T-shirt that was given to him by his second baby sitter (a devout Goth), with a padlock around his neck and his wisps of hair gelled up into a neophyte mohawk. Around the time the picture was taken I was also -- with an urgency that now seems strange to me -- attempting to cultivate in him a particular appreciation of Sham 69, one of the shoutiest and most troll-like of the early English punk bands.

"Alternadad" records Pollack's doomed attempt to preserve the sordid glories of his own youth (or some of them, at least) by handing them down to his son Elijah. Suspicious of the tuneful good humor of popular kiddie minstrels like Dan Zanes, Pollack begins to exert "cultural control" over his 2-year-old. He tutors him in the art of "rocking out." He plays him the Hives, Black Sabbath, and, yes, the Sex Pistols. For Elijah, all of this comes under the category of what he calls "thunder music," and it keeps him reasonably entertained, to the disproportionate gratification of his father: "The Ramones are a popular choice when people are trying to teach their kids the essence of rock," writes Pollack, "but after fifteen seconds of 'I Wanna Be Sedated' Elijah turned his attention toward his Fisher-Price Little People Farm. The next week, he surprised me when he said 'I wanna hear the Ramones, Daddy.' I nearly wept."

But Pollack, his vintage punk tears brushed aside, is too keen a satirist not to recognize the self-indulgence of such moments. Left to their own musical devices, as he well knows, children more often than not will display a mutinous preference for the sound of other children singing children's songs. Or for the Wiggles, the kid-pop quartet from Australia whose show on the Disney Channel is the toast of under-fives worldwide. The Wiggles met one another at the Institute of Early Childhood Studies at Macquarie University, in Sydney, and their unbelievable success is based in a solid grasp of the grammar of toddlerdom: Jeff, the Wiggle in the purple shirt, is always falling asleep, while Sam, the Wiggle in the yellow shirt, loves to drive the Big Red Car, and so on. Pollack, who calls their songs "Fruit Salad" and "Hot Potato" the "'Please Please Me' and 'All Shook Up' of children's music," wisely places himself in "the camp of tolerance" when it comes to the Wiggles.

The efforts of thirtysomething parents to provide some sort of alternative musical education for their progeny has already been noted and approved by the marketplace. A recent article about children's music in The New York Times featured the Los Angeles-based label Baby Rock -- purveyor of "lullaby renditions" of the music of Metallica, Radiohead, Nirvana, Tool and others -- and the Chicago-based children's rock festival Kidzapalooza, which this year featured a performance from New York punk priestess Patti Smith. Such easily consumed manifestations of kiddie hipness differ only in degree, not in kind, from the folksy Starbucks stylings of Dan Zanes, who after all was once lead singer for Boston-based '80s power-poppers the Del Fuegos.

How far will all of this go? Small children are certainly apprentice anarchists, but they are also great conservatives. They know what they like; they like it again and again; and no amount of cultural blackmail will persuade them to listen to something they don't enjoy. Whether my son, in 10 years' time, remembers the chorus to Sham 69's "Hurry Up Harry" ("We're going down the pub!") or Elijah Pollack the ringing, single-note guitar solo of the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated," will depend, finally, on the innate appeal of those bands. Brave punk rockers that they were, even they could never have anticipated such fierce and unforgiving scrutiny.

James Parker's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail cultural.studies@globe.com