Wiggling it beats a path for a better performance at school
August 15, 2019
Science Daily/Queensland University of Technology
Early childhood researchers have developed a fun rhythm and movement program to support young children's brains.
Marching, wiggling and tapping a beat aids young children to develop their self-regulation skills and improve school readiness, as shown in newly-published QUT early childhood research.
Associate Professor Kate Williams designed a low-cost preschool program focussing exclusively on rhythm and movement activities linked to pathways in the brain to support attentional and emotional development.
"Think heads, shoulders, knees and toes but do the actions backwards while you sing forwards. It tricks the brain into gear," Assoc Prof Williams said.
The Queensland study, involving 113 children from lower socioeconomic communities, measured the effectiveness of the program to boost self-regulation skills.
"Being able to control your own emotions, cognition and behaviours is an important predictor of school readiness and early school achievement," Assoc Prof Williams said.
"The aim is for regular sessions to be introduced into daily activities of young children to help support their attentional and emotional regulation skills, inhibition and working memory. We want all early childhood teachers to feel confident to run these fun and important activities."
The findings have been published in the international peer-reviewed journal Psychology of Music.
The study is a unique investigation about preschool children and the application of a rhythm and movement program to address socioeconomic-related school readiness and achievement gaps.
Assoc Prof Williams said differences in neurological processes can produce educational inequalities for young children who experience disadvantage. It's been identified by UNICEF as an international priority.
The study recognises what Assoc Prof Williams describes as the 'musician advantage' -- enhanced neural plasticity and executive functioning -- particularly among children given formal musical instruction.
"The children who have music lessons from a young age are often from families who can afford them," she said.
"The problem is that the children who most need the musician advantage miss out because it isn't affordable for all families to access highly quality music programs."
She said the benefits of early shared book reading between parents and children have long been established.
Another recent Australian study, led by Assoc Prof Williams, was the first to show that early shared music activities in the home also contributed to positive development.
The preschool program involved group sessions for 30 minutes twice a week across eight weeks, with stages becoming more challenging to stimulate change and development in self-regulation skills.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190815101544.htm
To improve future relationship with your kids, turn up the music
May 1, 2018
Science Daily/University of Arizona
Children who grow up listening to music with their parents report having better quality relationships with their moms and dads when they reach young adulthood, researchers found.
If you're a parent whose teenagers spend family road trips with earbuds firmly in place, you may want to encourage them to unplug, then turn the car radio to something the whole family can enjoy.
It just might do wonders for your future relationship with your son or daughter, according to a new study from the University of Arizona.
Researchers found that young men and women who shared musical experiences with their parents during childhood -- and especially during adolescence -- report having better relationships with their moms and dads as they enter young adulthood.
"If you have little kids, and you play music with them, that helps you be closer to them, and later in life will make you closer to them," said study co-author Jake Harwood, professor and head of the UA Department of Communication. "If you have teenagers and you can successfully listen to music together or share musical experiences with them, that has an even stronger effect on your future relationship and the child's perception of the relationship in emerging adulthood."
Researchers surveyed a group of young adults, average age 21, about the frequency with which they engaged with their parents, as children, in activities such as listening to music together, attending concerts together or playing musical instruments together. Participants reported on their memories of experiences they had between ages 8 and 13 and age 14 and older.
They also shared how they perceive their relationship with their parents now.
While shared musical experiences at all age levels were associated with better perceptions of parent-child relationship quality in young adulthood, the effect was most pronounced for shared musical experiences that took place during adolescence.
"With young kids, musical activity is fairly common -- singing lullabies, doing nursery rhymes," Harwood said. "With teenagers, it's less common, and when things are less common you might find bigger effects, because when these things happen, they're super important."
The research, published in the Journal of Family Communication, started as an undergraduate project by Sandi Wallace, who was a student in Harwood's class in music and communication and is the lead author of the study.
"I was interested in seeing if music, with all of its power and influence on society today, could perhaps influence and positively affect the parent-child relationship," said Wallace, who earned her bachelor's degree in communication from the UA in December and will start the communication master's program in the fall.
For their study, Wallace and Harwood controlled for other ways children spent time with their parents growing up, and were able to determine that music seems to have a unique effect.
They say two factors may help explain the relationship between shared musical experiences and better relationship quality.
This first is coordination.
"Synchronization, or coordination, is something that happens when people play music together or listen to music together," Harwood said. "If you play music with your parent or listen to music with your parents, you might do synchronized activities like dancing or singing together, and data shows that that causes you to like one another more."
The other way music may strengthen relationship quality is through empathy, Wallace said.
"A lot of recent research has focused on how emotions can be evoked through music, and how that can perpetuate empathy and empathic responses toward your listening partner," she said.
Harwood and Wallace found evidence that both coordination and empathy play a role, although coordination appears to be more influential, based on study participants' responses to questions measuring their empathy for their parents as well as how in sync they feel with their parents when working to complete a task together.
Important for parents to note is that shared musical experiences with their children don't have to be complicated. In fact, simple activities such as listening to music in the car together may have an even greater impact than more formal musical experiences such as playing in a band together, according to the researchers' findings, although their study sample of participants who played musical instruments with their parents was limited.
Future research should look more closely at the differences between formal and informal musical experiences, and also consider how music may affect the quality of other types of relationships, including romantic partnerships, Wallace said.
For now, Wallace and Harwood urge parents to increase their musical interactions with their kids -- especially their teens -- and even empower them to control the radio dial every now and then.
"For people who are just becoming parents or have small children, they may be thinking long term about what they want their relationship with their kids to be," Wallace said. "It's not to say that this is going to be the prescription for a perfect relationship, but any parent wants to find ways to improve their relationship with their child and make sure that it's maintained long term, and this may be one way it can be done."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180501193524.htm