Where Does Taste Come From? What Every Parent Should Know

Here is an uncomfortable fact, and then a piece of good news that follows directly from it.

The uncomfortable fact is this: the ease that some adults have with culture — the ability to walk into a gallery without anxiety, to follow a conversation about an unfamiliar book, to feel that the world of art and ideas belongs to them — is not something they were born with, and not something they mainly learned at school. It was given to them at home, early, almost invisibly, in the first decade of their lives. And children who were not given it at home tend to spend their adult lives feeling, in these settings, like visitors who might at any moment be found out.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent a career documenting this. He showed that what we experience as personal taste — what we find beautiful, what we find boring, what we feel at ease with — is to a remarkable degree the result of our upbringing, transmitted so quietly that it comes to feel like nature. The child raised in a home where paintings were discussed, where music played, where the question what do you think of this? was asked at the dinner table, grows up fluent in culture the way a child raised in a bilingual home grows up fluent in two languages: without effort, without memory of learning, as simply part of who they are.

This is the uncomfortable part. It means a good deal of what passes for natural cultural confidence is in fact inherited advantage, handed down in the home, and that children not given it start adult life at a quiet disadvantage that has nothing to do with their intelligence or worth.

The good news

But here is what follows, and it is genuinely good news: if cultural confidence is learned rather than inborn, then it can be taught. And it can be taught deliberately, by any parent who wishes to teach it — including, crucially, a parent who did not inherit it themselves.

You do not need to be cultured to give your child cultural confidence. You do not need to know art history, or to have grown up going to galleries, or to feel at ease in those settings yourself. The transmission does not depend on your expertise. It depends on something much simpler and entirely within your reach.

It depends on your willingness to wonder out loud.

What actually transmits

When researchers and educators look closely at how cultural ease is passed from parent to child, the mechanism turns out to be surprisingly ordinary. It is not formal instruction. It is not facts delivered. It is the accumulated effect of small, repeated moments in which an adult treats art and ideas as interesting, approachable, and theirs to engage with.

It is the parent who pauses at a painting in a magazine and says, huh, look at that. It is the kitchen where someone occasionally puts on music and says what they hear in it. It is the books left lying around, the museum visited without ceremony, the offhand question what do you make of this? asked of a child as though their answer genuinely mattered.

None of this requires expertise. All of it requires only the willingness to engage, out loud, in front of your child, with the world of made things. The child absorbs not the facts — there are barely any facts — but the stance: the sense that this world is open, that engaging with it is normal and pleasurable, that they are entitled to have thoughts about it.

That stance is the inheritance. And you can give it whether or not you received it yourself.

Wondering out loud is enough

This is why, at The Wondering Hand, the practices we suggest are so simple, and why we are so insistent that a parent does not need to be an expert. The whole transmission can happen through a parent who is willing to look at a painting and say, honestly, I don't know what's going on here — what do you think?

That sentence does an enormous amount of work. It tells the child that not knowing is permitted, that wondering is the right response to something unfamiliar, that their own thoughts are worth voicing. A parent who says I don't know, what do you think? in front of a painting is, in that small moment, transmitting cultural confidence as surely as any expert could — arguably more surely, because they are modelling curiosity rather than authority.

Giving it on purpose

What was once passed down only by accident, in the homes that happened to have it, can now be given on purpose, in any home, by any parent who decides to. This is, in a real sense, the great democratising possibility. The advantage that used to belong quietly to certain families can be deliberately extended to any child whose parent chooses to wonder out loud with them.

You do not need much. A painting on the wall. An occasional question asked sincerely. The willingness to admit you do not know, and to find out together. The habit of treating the made world as open and interesting and yours. Done regularly, across childhood, these small acts give a child the thing that no school reliably provides and that pays dividends for a lifetime: the unanxious sense that the world of art and ideas belongs to them too.

That is what taste really is, where it really comes from, and why it is within your power to give.

The Wondering Hand exists to help parents give exactly this — cultural confidence, built through slow looking and honest wondering, available to any family. Join our weekly letters to begin.