Music In Childhood Health Benefits

Early childhood is the range of age between birth and five years. In this stage of your child’s life their brain is forming. It is learning new things every single day. Activities, things you watch, music your child hears, or books you read to them are helping them to form their brains.

Music engages many regions of the brain. Music in the early childhood years can help with play, social-emotional communication, and sensory experiences. Music also helps a child with fine motor behavior, visual imagery, language, and emotions.

Modifies Mood

Music can help a child’s mood. When they are tiny and you are rocking them to sleep you may sing a lullaby about sleep to help them drift off. When they are sad you may sing a happy song to help lift their mood. Silly songs will make children laugh and giggle as they listen to the words.

Music that has a good beat will get a child up to dance and move around which can also help boost their spirits. It also helps children learn about emotions, and how sounds can change an emotion.

Improves Communication

There are some children who will learn to sing before they can walk. This is because songs are fun, and catchy. Your child may also have more confidence in singing a song than saying words. Music can help improve communication. It helps them learn to listen to someone else sing, which is an important part of communication. It also helps them learn new words. Listening to songs can boost vocabulary as well as language skills.

Children will learn grammar, sentence structure, and word order just from listening to music. It is also a great pre-reading activity because it helps a child learn to pick up on different sounds words make. This will help them later when they start to read to be able to sound out words. This understanding of sound helps strengthen their auditory perception.

Improves Listening

When listening to songs children will focus, listen careful, and then repeat what they have heard when they are trying to sing along. This active listening will help them later on in school years. Having good listening skills can also help develop and build your child’s concentration span.

Improves Memory

Listening to the same songs over and over may get tiresome for the parents, but for the children that repetition can be comforting. Repetition helps your child learn predictability. Predictability can help reduce anxiety, stress, or worry. Repeating songs over and over can also help your child learn to anticipate what will come next. Repetition also helps build their memory. They will memorize the lyrics and the beat of the music.

Auditory memory is an important skill to strengthen because it will help later on with reading and cognitive skills.

Helps Learn New Skills

Singing and songs are a great way to help introduce new concepts to your child. These new concepts could be counting songs, alphabet, ocean songs, animal songs, teeth brushing songs, or even sequencing songs. If you want to teach your child to do something correctly, find a song about it like brushing your teeth, or washing your hands.

Increases Motivation

To help motivate your child to participate in something, sing a song, like cleaning up their toys. Sequencing songs are important to learn because sequencing happens all over. Sequencing songs could be Ants Go Marching, or 6 Little Ducks. Learning about numbers that increase or decrease, or learning about a sequence of events like in If You’re Happy and You Know It.

Improves Fitness

Not only is music and singing beneficial for your little one’s mind, it is also beneficial in their physical development. Singing helps strengthen respiratory muscles. It helps your child optimize their breathing. Dancing gets them a physical workout and lets them do some big muscle movements.

Singing and dancing has also shown to help change hormones by regulating oxytocin, immunoglobulin A, and endorphins which helps improve the immune system and increases the feeling of happiness.

Movement songs and action rhymes like Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes are good gross motor skill songs. This gets your kids up and moving. It also helps with their focus and helps them learn to listen for directions on what to do next.