Parents can help babies develop rhythm ~ Moving to the beat an early step to learning music, research shows

Parents can help babies develop rhythm ~ Moving to the beat an early step to learning music, research shows

March 11, 2007 

Parents can help babies develop rhythm ~ Moving to the beat an early step to learning music, research shows

The Associated Press
Updated: 6:40 p.m. CT June 2, 2005

WASHINGTON – Gently bounce a baby while you sing, and you’ll usually get squeals of glee. But it’s not just fun: Feeling the beat helps wire babies’ brains to hear rhythm.

So says new research that tested moms and babies doing what comes naturally — dancing around together.

Everybody knows babies love music. Around the globe, parents sing to their infants in a special way, with a distinctive high pitch that’s soothingly slow for a lullaby and elaborately bright at playtime. Babies catch on quickly, able to perceive aspects of melody and recognize different beats at just a few months of age.

Important for development
As psychologist Laurel Trainor studied how babies perceive music, she noticed that parents hardly ever sing to them without bouncing or rocking or playing with their feet. She wondered if that movement was important developmentally.

Her research shows it is: Using multiple senses helps the brain learn about rhythm — how we move indeed influences what we hear — Trainor reports in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

“It’s wiring the sensory system,” said Trainor, of Canada’s McMaster University. “That early experience that parents do naturally is probably really important for learning down the road.”

Consider it an early step toward learning to make music, or at least to really appreciate it, said infant development specialist David Lewkowicz, a psychology professor at Florida Atlantic University.

“It’s a very clever kind of study,” said Lewkowicz, whose own research also shows that stimulating multiple senses is important for brain development. “When babies are learning about their world, we should never lose sight of the fact that they are learning in a … multisensory context.”

Moving to the beat
Trainor and colleague Jessica Phillips-Silver tested 16 healthy 7-month-olds by having them listen to music made by a snare drum and sticks that had an ambiguous rhythm — no accented beats. Mothers bounced half the infants on every second beat, in a march-like rhythm, and half on every third beat, in a waltz-like rhythm.

Then the researchers played the music again, this time with the beats accented in either the march or waltz pattern.

The babies preferred to listen to the pattern that matched how they’d been bounced. (Trainor measured preference by how long the babies looked at speakers playing the different selections.)

Watching someone else bounce to the music didn’t do the trick. In a series of tests, the babies picked out a rhythm only if they’d been moved to that beat while listening to the original, nonaccented tune.

Nor was vision necessary. Blindfolded babies picked out the rhythm, too, as long as they’d been bounced.

So what if you don’t boogie with your baby?

No one needs continual bouncing, and passive listening certainly isn’t bad. “But they’re not getting the full experience that they would naturally get in most human cultures” without some bouncing along, says Trainor, whose research was funded by the Canadian government. “It suggests that you’re better off to do music in an interactive way.

“It probably doesn’t matter if you listen to Mozart or a rock band or jazz,” she adds. “All those kinds of music and concurrent rhythms go to wire up the brain.”

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Kindermusik classes for parents and children 0-6 now enrolling! http://memphis.edu/cms/childhood.php

The value of bonding and development

http://misschrista.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/the-value-of-bonding-and-development/#comment-1836

A wonderful article from a great friend of mine.

In doing the comparison locally, my daughter dances at Bartlett Dance Factory, through Singleton. It costs $40/month per class. I just spent $85 on shoes for two classes, and will spend about $150-$200 this year on costumes and recital.

Gymnastics at River City is $50/yr registration, plus $63/month, with an ongoing contract, two week notice required to leave the contract. This is for recreationa,, not competitive

Kindermusik at the University of Memphis is $182 for 12 weeks, plus a $25 registration fee for a total of $207, with all materials included as Christa outlined.

Confessions of a cheerleader mom-or, who chooses music lessons?

This is a tough one-because obviously, I believe music is important for kids. Otherwise, I wouldn't teach it-and especially, I wouldn't teach it to ages 0-7.

But there also comes a time when the child is truly expressing a preferences, and circumstances, whether it's too much homework, too many nights out of the house for mom to keep her sanity, money, or just common sense force a choice. What do you do when your child is clearly expressing a choice that's not what you want?

My first thought is to decide what the important factors are. For me, having music as part of my daughter's life is important, and since she's homeschooled, she is not getting even the once a week school music class. However, that doesn't mean that a specific KIND or type of music activity is essential. When my daughter was 2, I was gung-ho about starting her on Suzuki violin. I'd always wanted to play strings, and hadn't had the chance to learn until college, and here I was, teaching every week in a building with all these wonderful string teachers. So, I got a violin and started practicing.  I bought the Suzuki book 1 CD and started playing it constantly. I pointed out the violins that my DD heard each week when we were in the music building. I told my daughter that pretty soon she'd be big enough to take violin lessons, and wouldn't that be fun? I pointed out the Elmo's World episode where the violin was the word of the day.

And my toddler told me flat out "I don't LIKE violin! I play flute!".

Oops! Guess I'd missed an important step-figuring out what the child wanted.

Anyway, my DD stayed in Kindermusik, which she did enjoy. In YC 1, after she started playing glockenspiel, she began picking out the melodies on piano, and started trying to figure out some of the piano books I had at home. I started giving her little mini-lessons when she asked for them-but didn't even suggest starting formal lessons. In YC 4, she started playing recorder, and wanted to play it more, so I asked her if she wanted me to teach her recorder. Her response is "yes, but I want Ms Teri to teach me piano". Enough said. So now, she takes piano with Ms. Teri, and recorder with mommy. It works. She found her own way.


If she hadn't wanted to take piano or recorder, we'd find another way to get music education in for our homeschooling plan-maybe a children's choir, or a music literature class or music theory, or maybe she'd have wanted to try that flute she said she wanted at age 2. And I would have been worried that I wasn't doing enough-but I would have tried to let her do it.

Similarly, I feel that it's important for her to have some form of physical outlet, especially since we homeschool. We've tried soccer and t-ball. She hated both. We tried swimming. She likes playing in the water, but doesn't particularly like it in her nose, and she tends to break out when she's been swimming. We tried dance and cheerleading and gymnastics. Basically, anything our local parks and rec department offered that she showed any interest in whatsoever.

What's stuck was probably the single thing hardest for me to accept as a graduated high school and college band geek-she loves cheerleading. She loves it enough that she's willing to spend hours working at the gym, not for gymnastics, but for tumbling. She loves it enough that she wants to do hip hop or jazz-dance team, cheerleader-type dancing, not ballet, despite having worn a tutu everywhere at age 3-and even when she's dancing with her dance class, she's jumping and moving with the crisp, brisk moves of a cheerleader, not the fluid movements of a dancer. So, I've become a cheer mom, going to competitions and sitting on uncomfortable bleachers to watch my pigtailed, pleated skirted daughter get picked up by kids only a couple of years older than she is, and sitting at the gym watching her work on back handspring prep. Oh, and sitting in the orthopedist's office when my child broke a bone in her hand trying to do a flip off the stairs like the "big girls"-and having the orthopedist comment "You're a cheerleader, you'll be back to see me again!".

I don't know what the future holds. There's some big part of me that hopes that by high school she'll decide that she'd rather march in a band than lead cheers on the sidelines, or that she'd rather dance to Tchaikovsky than Justin Bieber. But she's made a choice that fulfills the stated goal of having something physical. She's working hard at it. And she enjoys it.

And, if push came to shove, and we could only afford one activity outside the house, she'd pick cheer. And I'd go with her. Not just because I can teach it myself, but because music is something she enjoys and finds rewarding, but for whatever reason, cheerleading is what she loves.  And if she, later on, decides she wants to try something else, that's fine too.

But ultimately, if she's not hurting herself or someone else by her choices, they should be her choices. Even if it means mommy doesn't get to take violin lessons.