In a large room inside a Methodist church in a residential neighborhood, infants and toddlers sit in their caregivers’ laps, awaiting the start of their Tuesday morning music class. 

Everyone’s shoes are off. Each family has found a spot on the rug, forming a circle. An 8-month-old girl squeals and claps her hands — a skill she’d picked up just a few days earlier — as she bounces up and down. All eyes are on the teacher, Alyson Hayes-Myers, awaiting her notes on the piano, which will signal that class has begun.

Over the next 45 minutes, an otherwise bare room comes alive with sound and feeling. All seven babies are engrossed in Hayes-Myers’ direction and movement, in the songs, in the close interactions the program encourages between them and the adult who brought them. 

Research is clear about the myriad benefits of music in early childhood. It can support executive functioning, motor skills, language acquisition and social-emotional growth. It promotes engagement and early literacy. It can strengthen relationships and expose students to languages and customs from other parts of the world. 

In Hayes-Myers’ class, the evidence of the links between music and early development that are found in scientific studies come to life. In the presence of children who are singing or being sung to, who are listening to instruments or playing the instruments themselves, the brain development is obvious — and the joy is infectious.

Her class is in week four of a 10-week session that invites children from birth to age 4 to participate with a caregiver — often a parent, but sometimes a grandparent or nanny. It’s located in Denver, Colorado, at Twinkle Together, a licensed center affiliated with Music Together, which is an early childhood music and movement program with locations in over 2,000 communities across 35 countries. 

The program is designed for children, but the target audience may actually be their caregivers, explained Karee Justice-Bondy, director of Denver’s five Music Together locations. “Parents are key,” she said. “They are really our students, not the children. We know children love music.”

So many parents today, Justice-Bondy added, are inundated with information about how best to raise their children, and they end up ignoring their own intuition about how to parent, love and play with their little ones. 

“This can help remind you,” she said of music. 

It can be empowering for families to engage with music, creating opportunities for them to bond and grow together. Many initiatives around the country, including Music Together, are trying to help parents and caregivers tap into that. 

Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project is another program designed to leverage the power of music in early childhood. The Lullaby Project pairs new and expecting parents with professional artists to write personal lullabies for their babies. The project began almost 15 years ago in partnership with a New York hospital — music was identified as a tool to improve maternal mental health and well-being while strengthening bonds between parent and child — but has since reached families across the globe, in spaces such as refugee camps, opioid recovery centers and neonatal intensive care units, according to Tiffany Ortiz, director of early childhood programs at the Weill Music Institute, an education arm of Carnegie Hall. 

The Lullaby Project worked so well, Ortiz said, that families began asking, “What’s next?” In response, staff at Carnegie designed and built out additional music programming for young children and their caregivers, including Big Note, Little Note, a free 10-week music class for infants and toddlers up to 18 months old.

“People think of Carnegie Hall and these very polished performances, big stages,” Ortiz said. “It’s really these micromoments and the way music can be used every day. … We really are trying to empower families to feel really confident in their music-making, to bolster that bond.”

It’s working, she said. Parents and caregivers have shared with Ortiz that, after participating in a music program, they find themselves singing and making music throughout the day with their child — often during times of transition that can be challenging, such as brushing teeth, mealtime and bedtime. Music takes those tough moments and turns them into something fun and playful, Ortiz recalled families saying. 

“Often, music and music experiences are put on a shelf as a nice-to-have,” Ortiz noted. “It can be a really powerful tool in early development, but it can also help parents and families navigate the more stressful parts of early childhood. I’ve seen it transform so many people’s lives and create a sense of meaning and connection with a child.”

Dennie Palmer Wolf, principal researcher at WolfBrown, an arts research firm that has collaborated with the Weill Music Institute to evaluate its early childhood music programs, thinks of music as one of a few “natural resources” every family has (laughing and physical closeness are among the others, she said).

“It can potentially give parents a sense of being effective or capable,” she said. “It’s a source of strength and resilience, in a world that takes that away, grinds it down.”

Of course, this only works if parents are comfortable singing, and many are not. 

Ann C. Kay, co-founder of The Rock ‘n’ Read Project, which leverages music for early literacy, believes that shows like American Idol and The Voice have convinced adults that if they can’t sing well, they should not bother to sing at all. 

“There’s all these messages in our culture now that you’re going to be embarrassed if you open your mouth and sing,” Kay said. 

Susan Darrow, CEO of Music Together, made a similar point. Many people now feel that unless they “sound like Lady Gaga, they should sit in the audience and listen.” 

“That might be fine for our culture, but it’s a disaster for early childhood,” Darrow said. “I would love to be able to return music-making to the amateurs. … We want to raise children who are not afraid to sing.”

That starts at home, where the only judge is a benevolent one: To a baby, the most beautiful singing voice is that of their parent or caregiver, regardless of that adult’s ability to carry a tune. 

“We’re not trying to raise the next Yo-Yo Ma,” Darrow added. “We’re trying to raise children who love and participate in music.”

Beyond the benefits to parents, Palmer Wolf expounded on the way that music helps with children’s social-emotional development. When young children are singing and dancing together, they have an awareness of music stopping and starting, of taking turns, of getting quieter and louder, of imitating sound and movement, of self-regulation. 

“It’s an opportunity for kids to learn that your face, your hands, your eyes, your whole body says something to others,” Palmer Wolf said. 

And music can communicate messages far beyond the lyrics of a song, she added. Palmer Wolf has been studying the role of music in some preschools in Boston that have a growing immigrant population, she said, and she’s found that culturally-relevant songs can signal to families that they are welcome in the community. When preschools use music in that way, it helps to build a sense of trust among families who might otherwise be wary, she added. 

“We can’t underplay the signaling power of music,” she said.

This story was first published by The 74. The 74 is a nonprofit news organization covering America’s education system from early childhood through college and career. There are 74 million reasons we need to talk about education every day. Join the conversation. Read the story at: https://www.the74million.org/article/singing-to-your-baby-may-matter-more-than-you-think/