When your child isn’t communicating, you may still find that they enjoy music. Parents of children with speech or language disorders are aware of the positive effects music education can have on their child’s speech and language development. A child’s early language development, speech production, emotional regulation, and literacy abilities can be strengthened by early music instruction. Early music education can enrich a child’s brain development, improving neural connections. Moreover, music can enhance a child’s creativity, imagination, and self-expression. It can promote improved social and emotional development. Parental bonding is greatly enhanced when music is employed in daily routines with a child. Music enhancement can begin at a very young age for an infant, toddler, and a preschooler. Eventually a 3-, 4-, or 5-year-old may receive vocal or instrumental lessons to enhance their music education. Furthermore, this will instill values in the child, including a love for music and a deep appreciation for different genres and types of music.
Speech – Music allows a child to break down words into syllables and their consonants. It also helps to slow down speech when a child is dysfluent or stuttering. Singing can assist the dysfluent child to lessen their part word and whole word repetitions. Singing may help a child coordinate their tongue, lips, and jaw movements to transition from one speech sound to the next. A child with a speech delay can benefit from practicing their speech sounds in front of a mirror, while singing. Music can assist a child to recognize similarities and differences between sounds. Additionally singing will help enhance a child’s motor planning and programming to improve the child’s coordination of syllabic shapes necessary for speaking. Lastly, improving placement of a child’s problem speech sounds while using music, is another way to improve speech clarity.
Language – Music can enhance language skills and can improve language building. Moreover, this influences a child’s receptive and expressive language development. Learning the words to novel songs can enhance or propel a child to learn other languages, while the child interprets vocabulary from other cultures and differing musical genres. Language processing can improve through music instruction, helping a child distinguish different vocabulary and by improving discrimination between words that differ by one consonant. Children can enhance their discrimination musically and learn to rhyme words when singing songs. Music can improve a child’s expressive language by singing longer phrases instead of saying shorter ones.
Literacy – Music can enhance awareness of the sound structure of a word when a child listens and repeats a fingerplay or nursery rhyme. Moreover, this enhancement can assist children learning to read. Musical reading can improve with respect to prosody; the raising and lowering of a child’s pitch and moderation of loudness levels. Learning music encourages children to build their language skills which can also benefit their academic literacy performance in school. To improve literacy with music, a child can listen to a piece of music, and begin to rhyme the spoken words. An older child may sing the words on a piece of sheet music.
Social and Emotional Regulation – Music can improve a child’s ability to regulate within their environment. Music is repetitive, has patterns and is predictive. The language is predictable and when a child listens to the same nursery rhymes frequently, the child will start to begin to fill in the correct word in a carrier phrase. Secondly, they are improving their ability to calm down when anxious or upset. Feelings can be expressed through music. There are a few ways in which a child can begin to understand their feelings towards a piece of music. In particular, when a child begins to listen for chord changes, frequency changes, and volume alterations. You may ask your child, “How does this music make you feel?” Music with a slower tempo, and tranquil calming environmental sounds such as: waterfalls, peaceful rainstorms, a simple accompaniment and a familiar tune can be very calming for a child. A child may cease running around the house and may sit calmly and quietly listening to a preferred musical song. In summary, music can change a child’s energy level from a high energy to a lower energy level.
A delightful way to incorporate music in your child’s daily routine is to practice rhythm patterns. These rhythm patterns can be practiced using both vocals, chants, rhymes, and tapping out rhythms and rhymes using various instruments. Tapping out different patterns of rhythm is a great way to promote the understanding that music has various beats, rhythms and rhymes. A child will improve following a simple one step direction when imitating a tapping beat or when singing a rhyme in a song. The cadence will vary. Some songs may be tapped slowly and some may be fast. Music can also be used to fill in a word when singing a short phrase or nursery rhyme. Moreover, songs and nursery rhymes can include words left out for a child to fill in while singing. Other rhythms can be included during book and literacy time. A parent can talk about different rhythms and ask a child which rhythm is fast, slow, high pitched, or low pitched. Preschool age children who are exhibiting difficulty with 3+syllabic words can tap out the syllables on the desk, singing the word, using an open feedback phone held up to their ear. This phone can enhance musical and auditory feedback for a child who struggles producing multi-syllabic words.
Listening to different types of music as often as possible will expose a child to many different genres and forms of music that they may enjoy. The more music your child listens to, the sooner they will find genres and songs they love and will want to sing along to. Moreover, this will deepen their interest and motivation when learning music