To get your kids to listen to child music is a powerful way to enhance
time your kids play with toys. Perhaps you are thinking of buying music to enhance your child’s play space. You might be asking: What music should I buy for my child? Hopefully once you’ve read following article, you can be much better prepared to shop for your child. Not only will your money be better spent, but you’ll see better results from your children as well. We can look at this issue in three parts: 1) Music for Young Child: The “Why?” 2) The Theory 3) The Practical Application1) Music for Young Child: The “Why?”
Imagine that your child has gone to basement (or some play room) to play with his or her toys. Often what child will hear is either silence or noise of toys An excellent way to boost quality of play time of your child is to play background music.
Anthropologist A. P. Merriam in his book The Anthropology of Music says, "there is probably no other human cultural activity which is so all-pervasive and which reaches into, shapes, and often controls so much of human behavior.”(*1)
What is he talking about here?
He is talking about power of music on a person.
However, effects of music on children are much more powerful on children than for an adult. The reason is that children are in their formative years, and therefore whatever music your child is exposed to has a much more profound result than most people would realize.
In today’s world, we are bombarded by media. Television, movies, videos, and multimedia presentations are enhanced by music. With music either as a main element or in background, media know power of music on people, including children.
“You can never get silence anywhere nowadays, have you noticed?” -Bryan Ferry
So you can really shape a very big part of your child’s world by music you play for him or her.
2) The Theory: How to select Music for your child:
There’s been a lot of talk about effect of music on children. How to make children become smarter. How to make them better listeners. How to get them to study better. And so on. The music industry has turned this idea into a multimillion-dollar industry, focusing market on concerned parents and educators who want best for children under their wings.
The truth is that choosing good music for your child should not be a rocket science. You don’t have to rely on scientific studies to justify your purchases. It boils down to understanding some simply principles of music.
Let’s take a closer, more fundamental look at music. In a very basic sense, there are two parts to music:A) notes and B) lyrics.
A) The Notes:
The musical note is defined here as found in dictionary.com: “A tone of definite pitch.” Musical notes can be produced by musical instruments, or any device that produces wordless sounds.
The effects of instrumental music (such as is found in classical music) on children and their aptitudes and attitudes has been under much study. Even back in 1930’s (Fendrick, 1937, as cited in Koppelman & Imig, 1995)(*2), there were studies of effects of music on children. Recently, one of better known of these studies is “the Mozart Effect”. Much of original work was revealed in 1993, publicized by co-researcher Dr. Gordon Shaw. It was a study on effect of listening to music that resulted in better exam scores. Other researchers, such as Davidson and Powell (1986)(*3), showed beneficial effects of background music in classrooms.
But let’s get one thing straight. Studies or no studies, it is pretty clear that listening to music definitely does one thing to a person: it affects listener emotionally.
“Music is shorthand of emotion.” -Leo Tolstoy
Go to any classical music or rock concert, and you will see clearly that slow sad music will make a person’s emotional state turn towards melancholy. Fast-paced happy music will bring a person to a more cheerful state. So formula would actually be quite simple: state of music = state of mind. Children, being emotional “sponges” that they usually are, will pick up very quickly on state of music being played to them.
B) The Lyrics:
The next thing to look at are lyrics. Once again we can look at dictionary.com definition for our purposes: “Of or relating to a category of poetry that expresses subjective thoughts and feelings, often in a songlike style or form.” So lyrics are words, and therefore most often than not message of song. Words are very powerful in their effect on listeners.
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” -Rita Dove
This goes right to heart of what you want to expose your kids to in world of music. Ask yourself: what kind of message do you want your kids to get? There are all kinds of songs on market.
There are songs about being good people, and that we should all love one another. That we should learn to forgive and forget, to treat your fellow neighbor kindly. That we should seek happiness in healthy pursuits. That we should behave responsibly to one another.....
There are also songs about cool (kid) pornography and sex, hating your parents and teachers, or it’s cool to beat up other kids. That it’s “in” to smoke dope, or experiment with this or that drug. That it’s “ok” to cheat in school or on your boyfriend/girlfriend......
What messages do you want your kids to have? So we can have another formula here: nature of message = nature of thinking/attitude. Once again, what do you want your kids to have?
