What Are the Benefits of Practicing Music Together at home?
You’ve probably heard many times that humans are musical beings. Just seeing how infants
react to music is enough to believe this. Even babies in the womb respond to music. We’ve
seen many videos and examples of children who start moving to the music, spinning around the
room or kitchen, joyfully watching their parents cook. As they grow older, they put on
headphones, and it’s almost impossible to talk to them for a minute. For teenagers, a significant
part of their bonding with friends revolves around similar music tastes. All children, and honestly
all humans, have music within them, and our nature is intertwined with the rhythm of nature.
Thanks to advancements in neuroscience and psychology, we now have scientific evidence that
music benefits everyone: soft music reduces anxiety and significantly alleviates daily stress,
helping to regulate the mind and body. Children who memorize local songs, tap the rhythm of a
piece on their leg, or connect with music in any way are engaging various regions of their brain
and developing their cognitive skills.
Rhythm, Rhythm, Rhythm
Many educators, from the twentieth century to the present, have highlighted the importance and
ubiquity of rhythm in every corner of life. Perhaps the most basic and crucial feature of rhythm is
its predictability. Anyone can guess the repetition of a rhythmic sentence after hearing it once;
children are much quicker at recognizing and predicting rhythmic sentences. Sometimes, a child
insists on hearing a story or song repeatedly. This insistence is tied to their cognitive processes.
With each repetition, they take a step forward in their understanding. However, rhythm is often
considered purely musical, and parents usually do not engage with rhythm at home or try to
understand it with their children. Many musical parents believe that their child’s musical activities
are confined to the classroom and that rhythm and such things belong there. This belief implies
that musical activities start and end in the classroom. However, even classroom order is a form
of rhythm that helps children adjust their expectations and perceptions. Classroom discipline is
not necessarily a rigid procedure confined to the classroom but a set of techniques and methods
for internalizing data and concepts. Continuing classroom activities at home will undoubtedly
guide children towards creating patterns for prediction.
New Ideas for Shaping Household Order
Household order should be set up so that the child is always exploring the rhythm and sound of
the world around them. Why not start the day with music? For example, design a new
household routine with your favorite music and wake the child up with this sound. Younger
children prefer to hear music they are familiar with from school or class. Songs they learned in
kindergarten for washing hands and faces can also be used for waking up, making a good start
to the morning.
Another beneficial activity at home with children is playing musical instruments. However,
parents may not have learned to play instruments beforehand and cannot accompany their
child. This can be a good starting point to create a new household order: first, parents can
attend introductory music classes to get familiar with rhythm, musical counting, and solfège.
If you don’t have instruments at home, you can refer to the resources of the Pars Music Center
to make handmade instruments and use generally discarded items to create instruments and
play music with your child, practicing song rhythms and music.
Make Sounds with Household and Kitchen Items
While it’s not recommended to make loud noises that disturb others, sometimes it’s fun to
explore the sounds of different objects. Today, we can’t advise banging on expensive household
items, but why not make sounds with cans, bottles, and other things? Old pots, wooden, plastic,
and metal boxes, ladles, and whatever you can use will be useful. Experiment with different
sounds and line up several homemade instruments to play a rhythm correctly with your child.
You can even record a video of your playing and ask your child’s music teacher for feedback on
how well you performed the rhythm.
Remember, sounds have different qualities: experiment with speed, duration, volume, and
softness of sounds together and ask your child if, for example, hitting a metal tea can with a
wooden spoon makes a louder sound than a metal spoon. Discuss their answers and ask why
they think so!
Building Confidence
If you are musical parents but have only entered the world of music to help your child learn, you
may notice that your child can understand music much faster than you in many cases. Let them
lead you. Ask them to play a rhythm for you to imitate, and then each add something to this
rhythm. Remember, children love repetition and learn through it, so don’t go too far beyond
basic patterns unless your child is a teenager.
Listening to Music Together
When listening to music together, you can do it more consciously. Ask your child to talk about
the speed, intensity, or other details of the music. Can you identify the rhythm? Can you say
how many beats there are per minute? You can use a phone’s timer to count the beats.
Musical activities are not just for music education but also for establishing a sense of order that
children typically experience only in class. If we show classroom discipline at home, children can
teach themselves better than anyone. The point is to facilitate their learning process, which is
why many use the term “facilitator” to describe a teacher’s role. Socrates said, “The teacher is
like a midwife, facilitating the process.”