The Importance of Music in the Early Development of Your Baby

Have you ever noticed that your baby bouncing on your knee has a smile that goes ear to ear? Or that zooming through the air gets the biggest giggles with pleas of more, more, more? Why is it that children are drawn to such activities? Is it just fun and play or can there be more to it? The answers to the above questions are yes, yes, YES. The more we research, the more we learn that music truly does help your child's brain develop in addition to so much more.

In the last couple of years, the eyes of the research community have turned increasingly to music, and the marvels and mysteries they have discovered are nothing short of amazing (though perhaps not exactly surprising to people who've regularly witnessed its effect). The bottom line: early, positive, age-appropriate experiences with music can have a remarkable and research-proven impact on children's learning, including language and literacy skills (e.g., vocabulary, comprehension, listening, expression); social and emotional development; mathematics and pattern-recognition skills; and even ability to plan, guide, and self-regulate behavior. It's a lot to keep track of, so here are a couple of highlights.

Early music experiences can have a significant impact on literacy and reading. According to experts, learning to read depends on acquiring a variety of skills, including phonological processing, oral language, and comprehension. So when it comes to these literacy-boosting skills, how does music fit in?

Babies come into the world with brains hard-wired for listening. A fetus in the third trimester can already hear its mother's heartbeat and other environmental sounds, including music. During the first year of life, infants develop their listening skills further, responding increasingly to music, language, and tone. Listening is a major avenue for learning: hearing and recognizing the voices of different familiar people; recognizing the connection of certain sounds (e.g., lullabies vs. active songs) to certain activities (sleep vs. play); or simply knowing that a parent's voice or footsteps signal that food, a dry diaper, or comfort is coming.⁽¹⁾

Here's where music comes in. Researchers believe that music instruction helps children build active listening skills. By "tuning in" to music and other specific sounds carefully, one at a time, and with full attention, children hone their listening skills. Through songs and chants, children develop an ear for the patterns of sounds in words, phrases, and sentences. And as children listen to and sing words set to music, they become familiar with other sounds, rhymes, rhythms, and patterns in language.⁽¹⁾

There is no longer any doubt that there is a significant link between early music instruction and cognitive growth in certain other, "nonmusical" abilities, such as math, memory, and spatial-temporal reasoning. In fact, studies focused specifically on music for young children even suggest that these cognitive gains increase according to the number of years that students engage in active music learning, and even that the younger children are when they begin, the greater the gains will be!⁽²⁾

Editorial provided by Christy Dixon of Kindermusik with Christy in Duluth, GA.

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