Creating a Musical Bond in Infancy
I have to smile when I think back twenty-three years to the early weeks with my baby girl. What a bittersweet time. My tiny daughter had colic. She spent several hours a day bright red, legs bent, wailing loudly in the crook of my elbow. Not a big confidence builder for a new mom.
The indisputable research connecting music to human development was mostly still undone. But still, I had a degree and postgraduate work in music, including many courses in the psychology of music and music therapy. You'd think I'd have been singing to my screaming baby without grandma having to nudge me!
Teetering between desperation and exhaustion, I looked across the room at my approaching mom who leaned in toward us, gently touching my forearm and encouraging a bounce. She was also singing. "Do you know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man?" It was not a miracle colic cure, but it definitely helped settle her, and more importantly settled me. I felt connected to her in a way that gave me the feeling of purpose and focus I needed.
Beyond the music and math connection, the music and language connection, the music and movement connection, lengthy topics in themselves, there is music and the heart. I want to share what I have gleaned in my seventeen years as a Kindermusik educator about this most important area of musical value.
Experience tells me that the potential of music to foster emotional well-being is the most fundamentally important of all its properties. If a child is in a good place emotionally, their learning aptitude can be fully realized. The heart is opened in a way that has been described as “coherence” by Carla Hannaford and others. Hannaford describes scientifically how sound and music actually changes the vibrational patterns of the heart in “Awakening the Child Heart.” The ability to live in coherence, truly connected to others in a state of openness for optimal joy and learning, is achieved through touch, through play, through music. Check out “The HeartMath Institute “ for the science behind coherence and learn how the rhythmic vibrations of the heart give it in effect it’s own brain.
Let’s take a beautiful bonding ritual and examine it through the enhancement of music. Infant massage, which releases nerve growth factor, so vital in human development, can easily be a time to sing to your baby. Low soothing tones are less stimulating, and will feel more natural in this context of relaxed intimacy. Singing will make eye contact easier to hold because your baby will want to study your face and watch your mouth when you sing. With this, you create a rich and integrated sensory environment of touch, sound, and sight. It is when the senses are integrated like this that learning is solidified. Understanding occurs when one sense is reinforced by the other. The old song says, “The Look of Love is in Your Eyes.” Burt Bacharach, anyone? Dusty Springfield? It is also in your ears and in the touch of your hands.
Sometimes moms worry that they have a bad voice or don’t know enough songs. Your baby is born having heard your voice in utero for many months. It is their favorite sound! What the songs are is of no matter. Sing what you love. Play with the words, change them up, enjoy nonsense syllables. Sing it at different tempos and use the peek-a- boo musical surprise of sudden stops and starts. The repetition of the tune will help your baby to remember, predict and even experiment with his/her own voice. The fun you are having will relax you and your baby into delightful connection.
Another example of enriching an activity with a musicaI bond: it is old as the hills, which must mean it matters! So crucial to brain development, babies will rock themselves if this input is not provided to them. When a baby is rocked, the movement of the head is developing the vestibular system, crucial to balance and future control of their body in space. You cannot rock your baby too much and it certainly doesn’t have to be in a chair. What fun it is to hammock a baby with mom and dad at either end. Baby lies on a tightly woven blanket and is gently swung while you sing or play a favorite recording. Lying across parent’s back with arms around the neck is a favorite rocking position for toddlers, and there is so much touch involved. Just changing which hip you tend to hold your baby on while you stand with them will give them a different sensory experience. The idea here is staying open to moving all kinds of ways with your baby. Your openness and willingness to explore new ways of engaging translates quite literally as love through the coherence created between you. Your joy becomes your baby's joy.
“Music engages huge swaths of the brain. It's not just lighting up a spot in the auditory cortex," Dr. Aniruddh Patel, neuroscientist. It is truly impossible to be making music and not be learning. Bonding with a baby through these modes is truly a life giving force. It is love. With the bond you build through music play in infancy, you are setting the stage for toddler curiosity, preschool independence and early elementary performance. As an enhancement to other activities or the focus of your interaction, music will build your relationship with your baby in profound ways. It will take you places.
After hundreds of muffin man verses, I found myself one day in Kendall Park, NJ at the bakery with my little girl, whose name is Kendall. We called it the “Muffin Man Shop” and visited there often. There were no tears, only a confident and curious toddler who kept trying to escape me and join the bakers in the back to see their muffin magic. I still haven't tired of he song.