What musical inspirations are modern-day mothers using to coo their newborns to sleep? Apparently, they’re not so much Mother Goose:

Instead, parents are singing hits off their iPods, with two thirds of the 2,000 respondents [to the UK's thebabywebsite.com] saying they are more likely to croon “Patience” by the boy band Take That, or “Angels,” by the group’s former member, Robbie Williams, than “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” One fifth say they choose pop songs because they works better at calming a baby than a lullaby, while 13 percent say lullabies are just too old fashioned and 10 percent say they can’t remember the words to the traditional tunes.

Molding young minds with pop-cultural sludge. Suddenly, Baby Beethoven doesn’t seem like such a bad idea…

Actually, I remember someone once telling me that they would lull their infant to sleep by singing R.E.M. songs, and implying that that was, like, the coolest thing ever. Prompting me to think that, indeed, “Driver 8″ would make a sweet, gentle little bedtime sing-a-long.