5 Ways Music Promotes Child Development
We have a natural drive towards music from birth. Infants rock to the beat before they crawl and make songlike coos before they speak. As young children engage with music, they are developing key speech, cognitive, motor, and socioemotional skills. Playing a drum? They’re building their hand-eye coordination, sense of a steady beat, and ability to play with a group. Finger play to Twinkle Twinkle? They’re building fine motor skills and conceptual awareness. The best part? All of this happens while having fun and fostering their love for music!
The ways music promotes child development are countless; for this article, we’ll focus on some of our favorites: language development, gross motor skills, nonverbal communication, caregiver bonding, and sensory engagement.
1. Language Development
Can you imagine memorizing the ABCs without a song to help you out? Beyond the ABCs, most 3-year-old children already have a robust vocabulary of 1,500 words. WOW! Music can help encourage this language acquisition as songs use a variety of musical elements to encourage language development, including slowing the words down to hear all of the phonemes (smallest unit of language) or combining lyrics with melody to give meaning to each word and the sentence meaning as a whole.
2. Gross Motor Skills
We gotta dance! If you hear a catchy song at the grocery store, what does your body do? Do you tap your toes without even realizing? Nod your head along to the beat? Maybe even wiggle your shoulders? Even the shyest among us can’t help but move along to a great beat! Young children are no exception, and dancing to music can build their coordination, motor planning, and specific skills like walking, clapping, or jumping!
3. Nonverbal Communication
Ever played music with a group and everyone stops at the exact same time? Playing music together involves an unspoken agreement in which each group member carefully listens and watches for nonverbal cues. Young children are unconsciously aware of the rules of group music very early on, which is why they love stop/go music games! Playing with a group helps them continue to hone their ability to notice subtle changes in nonverbal communication.
4. Caregiver Bonding
Parents and caregivers have been singing to their babies to help them soothe and sleep for millenia, in cultures all over the world. Often lullabies are written in ¾ time, aligning with a rocking motion, and are slower and repetitive. Even when a parent feels they aren’t a ‘good singer,’ research shows that babies prefer the sound of their parent singing over a more ‘pleasing’ stranger singing. The power of the human voice to facilitate love and connection is immeasurable. For more on lullabies for caregiver bonding, see our post here.
5. Sensory Engagement
One of our favorite parts of music is that it is such an immersive sensory experience, involving our sense of touch, hearing, and vision! For little ones, music can even stimulate their sense of taste and smell, as mouthing instruments can be a developmentally appropriate method of musical exploration.
Touch: The simple act of touching an instrument, like a maraca, feeling the weight, texture, temperature, or sensation from the beads moving inside can be so ENRICHING for your little one’s senses!
Hearing: Music is multilayered, with so many auditory elements to focus on with tempo, melody, harmony, lyrics, rhythm, pitch, inflection, and timbre.
Vision: Young children may look at the variety of colorful and interesting instruments, look to others for nonverbal cues, or watch the singers’ mouth for speech habitation.
Young childrens’ brains are like sponges, taking in as much information as they possibly can! Group music can be an excellent way to gain new sensory experiences and practice important developmental skills. Aside from the extra-musical goals of child development, engaging with music is itself an enriching experience and such an important part of every young child’s life!