Teaching your child to love music

As a music educator, I often have parents of young children ask me, “At what age should my child start piano lessons?” or, “My son loves to sing, how can I encourage him?” and of course, “How can I tell if my child is musically gifted?”

Through my experiences as a musician, teacher, and parent, I’m convinced the answer to all of these questions is rooted in one simple belief: Music is a gift that you are fully equipped to give your child in his early, formative years. Well before junior is ready to begin piano, violin, or saxophone lessons, you can stimulate his curiosity and develop his musical sense. Your involvement with your child’s musical life can begin as early as the third trimester of pregnancy.

Babies in the womb have the ability to hear and respond to sounds during the third trimester, at which time the ear and the auditory brain functions necessary for hearing are sufficiently developed. Recently a team of psychologists from the University of Leicester, led by Dr. Alexandra Lamont, conducted a study showing that at one year of age, babies are able to remember, and in fact show preference for, music that was played to them in the final trimester in the womb. Although the sound becomes somewhat distorted as it travels through the layers of tissue and amniotic fluid, it clearly still makes a lasting impression on your developing infant. This is an excellent reason to start listening to a variety of music during your pregnancy, knowing that any music that you listen to will also make its way to your baby. Whether it’s Mozart, Miles Davis, or Maroon 5, your developing baby will be listening and learning.

During my pregnancy with my first child, I spent several hours a day playing the piano. In the hospital after his birth, I asked my husband to bring in a small radio, as my room wasn’t equipped with anything other than a TV. Our son, only one day old, was crying when we turned it on and started dialing through the various stations. When we tuned to a station playing piano music, he immediately stopped crying, and perked up with a look of curiosity and sudden recognition, as if he’d just heard his mother’s voice. Indeed, the sound of the piano was, in a sense, his mother’s voice.

Even if you are not playing or listening to music during your pregnancy, the sound of your beating heart, the rhythmic movements of your body as you walk, dance, make love, have already introduced your baby to rhythm.

The varying intonation of your speaking voice is his first introduction to melody. You can further enhance your baby’s in-utero musical experience by singing or humming out loud. While singing to your belly may feel silly, just think how wonderful it must sound to your baby.

Once your child is born, you can instill a love of music in your child without being a professional musician or requiring special lessons or equipment. Just cultivate an awareness of the music around us, and be willing to welcome and explore the sounds, rhymes, and rhythms of your child’s daily existence.

Encourage your child to explore the world around him through her auditory sense. In our culture, which is so fixated on the visual, we tend to experience our surroundings in a primarily visual way. Describing things to her using sound adjectives will encourage her to pay attention to her sometimes more subtle sense of hearing.

Draw her attention to the sounds that are part of her day: the sound made by cereal being poured into her bowl, the falling rain, leaves crunching underfoot, the purring of a cat, the blaring of a fire engine’s siren, the regular tick-tock of a clock.

Listen to a variety of musical styles together. Have a “listening time” where you devote your whole attention to music, as opposed to having music as just the backdrop for another activity. Take time choosing the music with your child, and talk to her about the style and mood of the music, what it reminds her of, and how it makes her feel.

Where to start when choosing music to listen to with your child? The range of available music is large and diverse with the advent of online streaming technologies and downloadable music. One can spend hours browsing through online music stores and playlists, stumbling across new genres that didn’t even exist a month ago. Try the Rhapsody Radish for a site listing a variety of playlists.

The radio alone, and particularly community radio, which tends to be stylistically diverse as well as commercial-free, can provide a smorgasbord of musical styles for you and your child to sample. As for CDs, my advice is to avoid those marketed exclusively to babies—although I do admit to owning Raffi and a few other “kiddie classics.” Once you take a good look at your CD collection, you’ll realize there are plenty of recordings for grown-ups that also appeal to children. African and Latin musical styles are a hit because of the upbeat, fun nature of the music as well as the strong emphasis on rhythm, which can prove irresistibly danceable for little feet. And with its simple melodies and steady beat, pop music from 1960s bands such as the Beach Boys or the Beatles is also popular with tots.

One of our big surprises was our second child’s taste for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—the whole thing. It seems that, as with food, the more flavors our children are exposed to from an early age, the broader their palates will be as they mature.

Start making music with your baby as soon as she is born. It can be as easy and as natural as playing the echo game (she gurgles, you gurgle back) or singing her to sleep with a lullaby. Just about any song will do, if you sing it softly enough. And don’t worry about not having a good enough singing voice; to her, your voice is the most beautiful voice in the world.

Don’t remember the words? Invent song lyrics about your child. As she grows, the songs you sang to her throughout her babyhood will be deeply etched into her memory, and eventually, when she’s able, she’ll start to sing them too.

Children are listening to and absorbing everything we say and sing, although their ability to reproduce it will lag behind. I once spent an entire month of December trying to coax my two-year-old into singing “Jingle Bells” only to have him sing it incessantly throughout the months of July and August.

The sister component to melody is rhythm, which your child has already begun to experience in the womb. The key to establishing a good rhythmic sense lies in connecting him physically to the pulse by getting him to clap (or stomp his feet or make another sound) to a regular beat. Do this to accompany a rhyme such as patty-cake, or encourage your baby to clap along with you while the two of you sing or listen to music. If he is too little to clap on his own, just take his hands in yours and clap for him. He will love feeling his body moving in time with the beat of the music.

When you take him in your arms and dance with him while listening to music or singing songs, he is getting a powerful fusion of physical movement, rhythm, and melody.

Older babies and toddlers love to make noise, the louder the better. And what better way to make noise than banging on a drum? This is something he is actually allowed to hit as hard as he can; and it makes a big noise to boot! His drum can be something you buy at a music or toy store, or it can simply be an empty coffee can, yogurt container, or overturned saucepan, with a wooden spoon as a drumstick.

As your child is exploring, listening, and joyfully making his own musical noise with your encouragement, he is learning to make music an integral part of his life. It is up to you to nurture in your child a love of music and to share with him the joy of making music.

From there, the world is his orchestra.