World Radio Switzerland

Kids in Mind: Growing up to the sound of music

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 12:00:01 UT

By Rachel Melville-Thomas

Happy talk

Singing and listening to music helps babies begin to understand the way language is constructed, how it is divided up into phrases and has a rhythm in the words. Infants learn best through their bodies, so it isn’t good enough to switch on the nursery cassette player and walk away. They need you to copy their movements to music and to pick out the patterns for them over and over.

What to try: Sing or hum and rock your baby in your arms. Starting at around 6 months, get face-to-face and hold their hands as you sing or listen together. Pat him on the back in time to the music, let him have rattles and shakers to see what sound comes out.

Music and maths

The structure in music means that children’s brains need to learn how to decode it—how to process the sound information they are hearing. This process is closely linked to the skills needed in maths to work out fractions, ratios and proportions. Professor Gordon Shaw in Los Angeles was one of the first to explain how crucial music could be for learning in a series of studies in the late ’80s. Children who took keyboard lessons in addition to maths help came out with better results by 40 percent.

Homemade music
Ideas for starting out to make music at home without costly instruments:

18 months to 6 years:

POTS AND PANS PERCUSSION
Let your baby or toddler have a wooden spoon and make a drum set by upending saucepans and plastic storage boxes.

TWANG GUITARS
Save tissue boxes and stretch rubber bands over the top so they span the hole.

SHAKE YOUR SILLIES OUT (with thanks to Raffi)
Make your own rattles and shakers by filling plastic bottles or containers with rice, lentils or pasta. Seal well around the top with soft tape if caps are not tightly fitted.

HOOTING AND HOLLERING
Blow or sing down the inner tube of a kitchen roll for a trumpet, and hum and make raspberry noises down it for a passable didgeridoo sound. Roll cardboard into a cone for an instant megaphone for your budding singer.

For older children:

THE WINEGLASS SYMPHONY
Get a series of glasses and fill each one with a different amount of water. Tap them with a wooden chopstick or a plastic cocktail mixer. See how the sound varies and test to see if you can get them all in sequence.

What to try: Let toddlers experiment with sounds and rhythms themselves. You don’t need special equipment (see Homemade Music at right), just join in with the shaking and clapping. Identify rhythms for them: Say “da-da-da” as they bang the tabletop three times.

Rhyme and reason

Dr. Frances Rauscher from the University of Wisconsin found that music helps enhance the part of the brain that deals with abstract reasoning and spatial cognition—that’s the thinking you need in jobs such as engineering and architecture. Music itself is a Rubik’s Cube in your head, needing the brain to hear its “shape” in order to make sense of it and recognise new patterns.

What to try: Play different kinds of music to your under-6-year-olds so they get to hear a good variety. This isn’t just about Mozart—in fact, Dr. Rauscher suggests that unknown music styles cause stress to rise and children’s attentions to shut off. Go back to old nursery rhymes and repeat phrases to well-known tunes, for example, “Wash, wash, wash your hands” to “row, row your boat.” Play lap games that have loud and soft parts like “This is the way the farmer rides…”

All together now

Musical activities are a great place to develop your child’s social skills. As music teaching and therapy demonstrate, children in group music sessions learn to take turns, to attend to others and to predict what the other person might do next. That skill of predicting connects directly with empathy which is a key part of your child being able to make friends and understand when things go wrong.

What to try: Join a musical activity group appropriate to your child’s age. Or just have sessions at home, by putting on some music and having a sing-along band with percussion and karaoke-style vocals. Play “follow the leader” with rhythms banged out with a spoon.

Once again with feeling

Music offers children an arena to express their emotions and to become more confident. Listening to fierce classical music or a wistful folk tune may evoke a wide range of responses that may not be easily put into words. Young people on the autistic spectrum, for example, often are able to “say” how they feel far more articulately in sound and rhythm. And any child can sing a dreamy song or bang out their crossness in music. This is also why music can provide a refuge and a place of understanding for teenagers—even though everyone around just wants to pull the earphones out!

What to try: Remind yourself what feelings are aroused in you, as you listen to favourite pieces of music. Ask your child what comes into his mind when listening to a particular piece (be ready for the “Nothing” answer!). What do they think is the best music? The worst? Sometimes when listening to music around your children, just say nothing and let it be.

Roots and rhythms

Music is a powerful way for us to pass on our own culture to our children. They will recall the cradle songs you sang from your homeland, long into their adult years. Knowledge of songs and rhymes and dance tunes from a special country gives children a sense of being rooted somewhere—even when the family is travelling and moving around the world.

What to try: Sing songs in your mother tongue to your child. Play CDs if you can’t remember them yourself. (It also helps bilingual children to develop pronunciation and vocabulary to be able to sing songs in both languages.)

Answers to common music questions

My 11-year-old used to love his instrument lesson, now he’s saying he wants to give up because it’s too hard. What shall I do?

Consider whether it’s the right instrument for his personality. There are plenty of books and web resources on this. It’s possible he needs a more social instrument, or one that has more contemporary possibilities. Or a different teacher perhaps? Encourage him to keep going until an agreed upon time, such as a birthday or holiday. Think through what other pressures he has. Homework? Sport? Friends leaving? Has he just started secondary school?

Check with yourself about whose needs are being met by the music lessons—yours or his?

Negotiate a break. Remember that many people who were forced to take lessons give up by late teens. Growing to hate it would be worse.

I really can’t stand my teenage daughter’s music—it’s either blasting out of her room or she’s incommunicado because she is plugged into her iPod. How is music helping her now?

Music is an enormously important refuge for teens—it can be the place where their unspoken thoughts are voiced or the safest outlet for their frustrations with growing up.

Sometimes extra loud music from a room can be a communication—like “I hate everyone!”—or simply a pursuit of the intensity of sensory experience that adolescents crave.

You may need a contract to address the problem, for example: Music can be played as loud as you like when there’s no one at home (though this can be tricky in Swiss apartments!), no earphones at the meal table or first thing in the morning when discussing plans. Sanctions: loss of iPod and computer time for two days.

Tell her you would like to hear how things are going at school with friends. Do it in the car or shopping as a side-by-side chat, and listen for serious worries.

Five must-know parenting tips

Fri, 15 May 2009 14:00:00 UT

1. Children like sameness

You might think that children like a challenge, that they get bored easily with the same old routine, same activities, same country to live in, but no!

Underneath it all, they thrive on things essentially staying the same. So when your home, your bedroom and your school are all constants, you can afford to be excited by novelty—say a summer trip to another country. You might see problems with this around times when things change, for example, the beginning and end of school terms, changes of teacher or having to move house. I call it “transition stress” and it’s safe to assume that it will be there in some form.

Watch out for changes and the effects they have, and when times are hard keep as much routine as possible. Use calendars with hand drawn stick figures for young children. Prepare them, give warnings about when change is coming, and keep them informed. Never think “it’s better if they don’t know.” When children are sad, fed up or stressed by something, offering new, “fun” exciting things isn’t necessarily the answer. They might feel a lot better just curling up on the sofa with a book or an old familiar DVD.

2. Happy kids don’t bully

Children who bully others are doing it for a variety of reasons—usually because they feel powerless themselves and take it out on children they perceive to be weaker. Some bullies feel threatened by difference or “outsiders” such as children who speak another language or whose appearance doesn’t fit in.

Research shows that children with good self-esteem and good relationships with their parents don’t need to push other kids around. This can help your child to understand why someone is bullying them, or, from the other side, might help you to see what has drawn your child into being a bully.

3. Don’t gloss over problems

Sometimes children seem to get overly upset about things that may seem relatively minor to us adults—breaking up with best friends, lost football matches or fears about school work.

Try to ban the phrase “Don’t worry” because your child IS worrying and can’t just snap out of it. Instead, have a go with “Oh dear, that’s really tough!” and then try to imagine just how dreadful the problem is for them.

Listening sympathetically is half the problem solved and a great parenting skill to develop.

4. Help your child to work it out

Help your child to rehearse thinking things through for themselves. So, rather than rushing in with an answer for a question, say “I wonder what you think?” This gives them the message that they do have reasoning abilities which can help in worry crises. They don’t always have to rely on a grown up to fix everything.

Key phrases when problems arise: “Why do you think Sophie said those mean things?” Or “Instead of hitting Theo, what else could you have done?”

5. Let them say the bad stuff first

This is my favourite, and the one thing I remind parents to do more than any other. Somehow, it is SO difficult to let children express their negative feelings. We always want to rush in to fix things for them, to prove that their worries are ill-founded, to get as fast as possible to the “cheer up” moment.

Linked to the “Don’t gloss over” tip, try to do three things when your child is upset:

Listen carefully. Stop doing what you are in the middle of, squat down to their level if necessary, look at them.
Reflect back. Repeat back what they say, for example, “You feel really cross because we aren’t going swimming.”
Respond carefully. Empathise with how hard it is, how horrible they feel, what a tough problem they have.

When the bad stuff is out, there’s a space for the solution!

— RMT

If you have specific questions about your children, send them by email to kidsinmind@worldradio.ch. Rachel will respond to as many as possible during the special “answers for parents” editions of Kids in Mind the last Friday of every month.

Topics: children

Beating the summer blues

Fri, 15 May 2009 13:40:00 UT

Why does this happen for children?

Changeover from highly structured to non-structured life
Loss of routine and familiar social setting
Having to decide what to do every day

How does it show?

More squabbles
Lethargy
Irritability
Minor illnesses

What can parents do?

Week one: Keep some structure. Get kids up at a reasonable time, go to bed at usual time.

Focus on mornings: Give little tasks every day—make beds, tidy toys, clean the rabbit cage. Exercise every day—swim, football, parks. Pass the message on to caregivers too!

Get small children drawing and colouring. Bigger kids start holiday diaries.

Decide NOW on family use of TV, DVDs, Gameboys etc or you may spend the vacation with a techno zombie.

Buy interesting craft supplies: Paper, clay, fix-it models, scrapbooks. Stock up on “things to do“ books from the library.

Talk about people at school: ‘I wonder if Mme Dupres is up yet?’ ‘What did David say he was doing this summer?’

Summer camps: Be thoughtful, allow for some moaning, disinterest, anxieties about meeting new children. Allow time for social reorganising— new groups need time to work out the dynamics. They’ll get there.

Family vacation: Have realistic expectations, remember transition stress. Kids like one spot they can settle into, so don’t go for multiple locations.

Take a break in your own home. Sometimes the best holidays involve home-based daytrips for a week.