Singing Practices in 10 Families with Young Children

Lori Custodero studied 3-year-old children from 10 families in New York, chosen from a larger telephone survey about music in the household. The study used home visits, interviews, and parent journals to document singing practices in everyday life in these families. Socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds were diverse. The study looked at the different functions of singing in households, like traditional cultural songs, songs that accompanied routines, songs for play, songs to direct children's attention, and songs for aesthetic purposes.



I found it interesting that many of the parents did not realize how central music was to their lives until they paid attention to it. It is common for people to sing or hum to themselves absentmindedly without realizing it, and parents often do the same with children, to fill silence or because talking to young children in a sing-song voice seems to come naturally to mothers. I was glad to see that Custodero cited Dissanayake; it reminded me of Dissanayake's work "Becoming Homo Aestheticus" and also a paper (I can't find the author) that I read in a cognitive science class that was about the developmental function of babytalk in mother-infant communication. Studies have suggested (and I also believe this to be true, just from my own personal observation) that incorporating music into routines helps children to learn; musical mnemonics are more easily remembered than strings of data, and associating certain songs with routines like hand-washing or shoe-tying helps to both entertain children and structure their routines.

The part I found most interesting was the one mother who said that she used songs to make her children behave. When they would fight, she would redirect their attention to singing together, taking up any cognitive faculty they would otherwise be using to fight. This application of the cognitive economy theory is particularly useful in young children, whose brains focus best on the concrete rather than the abstract and have not yet learned to run on multiple lines at the same time. It also reminds me of the ancient classical ideas that music can control one's emotional state. That idea seems so attractive to people for whatever reason that it has gone through the medieval with different church modes, the baroque with the doctrine of affections, it's touched upon in some texts in terms of what, exactly, absolute music expresses; obviously, even in the present, people who are not trained in music history tend to believe it. It's a huge testament to the power of music in society.