Consider the following two videos:
These two videos have both gone around the web a lot over the past few years. Both seem to be viewed mostly positively. Both performances seem well practiced and rehearsed; but they show radically different sides of children's singing.
In the first case, we have an 11-year-old girl wailing away in what seems to be an exact facsimile of some adult singer's rendition of the song. We get growls and big sounds, belted high notes, and we are amazed that she is only eleven! What might time bring? But all is not well: many trained singers will tell you that the way this very talented girl mimics adult sounds is not particularly healthy. Moreover, if she sounds so "adult" now, which we praise, how will she sound when she's 30? Will she sound 75? Will she sound the same? Is either choice likely to be satisfying?
On the other hand, we have a 14-year-old boy accurately sing through a coloratura opera aria, and he sounds exactly like a 14-year-old boy soprano. The piece is rangy and difficult, with runs and staccato notes and some chromatic harmony, and YouTube commenters mostly show amazement at his skill. How will he sound when he's 30? Nothing like he sounds now, for certain, but we can guess he'll still sing in tune, in tempo, and with energy, which should serve him well in any style he chooses to sing.
These two videos catch us applauding child performers for totally different reasons, and this difference tells us a good bit about how singing is often perceived and interpreted today.
We applaud Bianca's precocious vocal talent, but what exactly impresses us? We're not applauding any openness of communication beyond her years, or a genuinely moving performance, but the fact that her singing sounds unnaturally grown up. She's an amazing mimic, and she clearly has the pipes and musicianship to mimic convincingly, but this becomes the focus at the expense of actual music. Later in that same season she takes on "Piece of My Heart" by Janis Joplin. It sounds, again, impressively like the original, but it's unsettling to watch this 11-year-old girl sing of "how a woman can be tough".
To be fair, Robin Schlotz taking on Mozart's Queen of the Night in her big vengeance aria could also be thought inappropriate; the big difference lies in how we interpret his sound. We get no delight from how much he sounds like a real operatic soprano, but because he's able to maintain good principles of singing--accurate rhythm and pitch, a healthy sound, good phrasing--through a technically difficult piece. When we applaud, we applaud skill alone. Now Bianca also has musical skill--but if she sang merely accurately, the applause would not have been so rapturous.
Another way you could phrase this: Robin's voice cannot convincingly mimic the sound of a commodity, while Bianca's can. In other words, Bianca not only sounds like an adult, she sounds like a recordable and marketable adult. Robin sounds like a boy, so no amount of talent can make him ready for the adult marketplace.
You can see in this situation how much decades of listening to a so-called music "industry" affects how people interpret singing. The singing called "good" is the singing most like already-produced recent commercial and pop music. If Disney Channel graduate Nick Jonas doesn't have the technique to sing Les Miserables, people still defend his singing because they can recognize the sound of his pop albums in his attempted Broadway belt. Good singing is singing that sounds like a commercial record we already have. And more and more, technology can pick up the slack for singers with uneven, weak, or even out-of-tune voices. In other words, it can help bad singers sound like preexisting pop music. It can make the bad singers into good singers.
This is unhealthy for the singing field in general. Bianca Ryan's very real talent requires discussion of the mechanics of her success, including the unhealthy components, to be truly perceived. Robin's talent can only be perceived through such discussion. Without reference to some kind of principles of singing, principles independent of the commercial music world, the public's ability to evaluate and thus appreciate talented singers will continue to erode.
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