We have three children, who are now all adults. In the case of our boy, nominally so, as he’s 21 and lives with us. With his house rabbit. His sisters have long since flown the coop.
While there’s 11 years between them, they would recognise a lot of similarities in their childhood experiences. We read to them a lot. We played imagination games with them a lot. And we sang to them a lot … well, I dutifully trudged through the classics (Twinkle, Twinkle, etc), but my wife was always singing to them. If there are any psychological or developmental benefits to a musical house, the credit probably should go to her.
We now know a surprising amount about how infants and children respond to music. And the research we have tells us a lot about infants, but also about music.
Take musical phraseology, for example. In music a phrase is the equivalent of a sentence; a complete musical “thought”. Sure, the composer is the person who generates that “thought”, but there is a structure that transcends individual composers. Mozart is regarded as a pretty competent composer, so he was pretty good at this.
How do you know if infants perceive a complete – versus incomplete – musical phrase? This is the challenge for the developmental psychology researcher ‒ coming up with cunning ways to test infant psychology when you can’t ask them to tick a box in a survey. The answer is we use the behaviours that infants have.
Show a baby a new toy then put it behind your back and they’ll probably go back to looking at you or something colourful around you. When the toy comes out… wide eyes, reaching, maybe a smile. Rinse and repeat, and you’ll get the same reaction. But not forever. After a while infants “habituate” to stimuli. In short, we can use things such as attention span as a way to tell what’s going on in the infant brain.
Back to music. We can use attention to study infant’s musical perception. Next we take a bunch of Mozart and cut it up into whole or incomplete phrases. Imagine taking a whole sentence and contrasting that with two sentences hacked in half. Then you sit baby on a parent’s lap in a booth with a speaker on each wall, randomly play the “correct” and “incorrect” phrases, making sure that the “correct” phrases are consistently played through the same speaker. Meanwhile, a naive observer records where baby is looking and for how long. Ta-da, babies look more to the side where the correct phrases come from, and spend longer looking.
And singing? What parent hasn’t tried to soothe their child by humming or singing to them? It feels pretty instinctive, and research shows singing works better than words in soothing the savage breast. So, what if you got a group of parents to sing more to their babies? Just-released research shows the benefits transcend individual moments, and babies who are regularly sung to tend to be happier and more content, even after the researchers stop checking to see if you’re still singing.
Part of the underlying rationale is that singing – the music parents make with the voices that infants are attuned to, provides a connection that contributes to secure attachment, which is a building block of how we move through our social world.
In fact, recent reviews show music may be particularly helpful for building that connection at one of the toughest parental times – after premature birth. Music (singing and piped tunes) in neonatal intensive care have strong positive effects on baby heart rate and breathing, but also how much prem babies feed; as well as reducing anxiety in parents (these studies tend to focus on mothers).
Of course, you’d be right in thinking the type of music we’re talking about matters. Personally, I’d avoid death metal.
