A woman holds a fretful baby. She nestles him
close to her chest, sways rhythmically, and begins to croon a
simple, repetitive tune in time to her movements. Her voice is
soft, intimate; it rises and falls for the baby alone. Soon the
baby relaxes against her, and as he slips into sleep, her singing
slows, drops to a whisper and fades away.
It's a scene that could have taken place in any era, and in nearly
any culture. Before white noise and heartbeat tapes, before
crib-rocking devices and baby swings, mothers rocked and sang to
their babies. And many parents still enjoy sharing music with their
infants.
These days, the music is often recorded. I learned to two-step (and
gained a temporary appreciation for country music) dancing my first
baby to sleep with Emmy Lou Harris. Years later, while researching
a Steps & Stages article on fathers and babies ("Daddy's
Delight," November 1995), I discovered that our
get-a-wired-baby-to-sleep routine was far from unique. Nearly every
father I talked to had special music he used to play with or
comfort his baby.
Certainly, if you have to walk the floor with a baby, musical
accompaniment makes it more enjoyable for you. And if music does
nothing but make baby-soothing less like work and more like
pleasure, it's well worth the bother of popping in a favourite
tape. But researchers have discovered that babies, too, are
responsive to music.
In Your Baby Needs Music , Barbara Cass-Beggs, founder of the
Listen, Like, Learn music program for babies and young children,
reports: "Babies absorb sound, speech and music very early, and
when they are about 24 days old they can discriminate quite small
changes in rhythms; at one month, infants can recognize family
members by their voices. A five-month-old baby recognized a musical
composition as soon as she heard any part of it after she had been
exposed to it daily."
Cass-Beggs urges parents to go beyond recorded music, and to
actually sing to their babies. Sandra Trehub, a psychology
professor at University of Toronto who has studied babies'
responses to singing, agrees. She notes that, "all over the world
singing is used in work and play. It's pleasurable and it seems to
bring people together, to be part of a bonding experience."
Trehub suggests that singing to babies seems to come naturally to
many people: "Even when we talk to babies we alter our speech to
make it more musical. We make our speech more rhythmic and
repetitive, and we highlight pitch contours. Musicality makes the
voice more emotionally expressive, and babies respond to
this."
Trehub cites a fascinating study in which mothers recorded the same
song twice - once when singing to their babies, once just singing
alone. Then the (audio) tapes were played to the babies. Adults
watching silent videos of the babies listening noticed that the
babies seemed to pay more attention to some tapes than others - and
these turned out to be the recordings that had been made while the
mothers were singing to actual babies.
This is the advantage singing has over recorded music - the
personal connection.
While you really don't need more reasons than these to sing to your
baby, Cass-Beggs argues that singing also helps the baby's
development. "Although the centres of music and speech are located
in different parts of the brain, we know that singing helps speech,
and of course crooning and chanting are closer to speech than to
singing. Crooning and lullabies are important, for they give
pleasure and a sense of security to the baby. In addition, they
provide the first steps on your baby's long road in learning and
will help her to speak and to understand speech."
But what if you just aren't a very good singer? Both Trehub and
Cass-Beggs hasten to reassure those of us who would hesitate to
sing in front of an adult witness. Our babies, they say, may be the
only completely non-critical audience we'll ever get! "Babies don't
say, 'Oh, that's a bad version of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,'"
jokes Trehub. They really do like you just the way you are, and
many parents discover that with their babies, they can sing with
the unselfconscious pleasure previously found only in the
shower.
By Holly Bennet. This article is kindly provided by:
