by Caron B. Goode

Love, respect, and appreciation for music are easy to share with our children and build life skills at the same time. During the first years of our child’s life, musical skills build self-esteem and enhance expression. Musical rhythms spur motor development. Learning melodies and words stimulates listening capacity and help children develop receptive language. Specific areas of child development and learning are positively affected by exposure to and training in music. Preschoolers given piano and voice lessons, for example, have been found to improve dramatically in their ability to put together picture puzzles of animals. Playing the piano at the preschool age influences development of the cortex, the part of the brain used for thinking, talking, seeing, hearing, and creating. Music training contributes to the ability to learn or enhance mathematics skills.

Music clearly is a resource for living, growing, and learning and can be an integral part of our children’s growing experiences.

Exploring Sound, Rhythm, Melody and Music

Music is controlled movement of sound, in time.

Music is three basic components: Sound + Rhythm + Melody = Music

Sound
To help children understand music, it is helpful to look at each component separately. First there is sound, one that we make or one from another source. A few examples of sound are a bird chirping, a teakettle whistling, and a child banging on a pot with a spoon. If music were compared to a painting, sound would be the background color. In our bodies, sound corresponds with our central nervous system. A pleasant sound opens and expands us. It can energize or calm us. A shrieking sound puts our nerves on edge. Like the background in a painting, sound is the first step in creating music.

Here are some ways to explore sound with our children.

• Have your children listen to the sounds around them. How many different sounds can they find in the kitchen or backyard?

• Encourage children to be creative making sounds. Have them use their voices or household objects to make sound. Allow them to make pretty, irritating, or silly sounds. They are all music if they reflect creative exploration or honest feelings.

The purpose for creating sound is not necessarily to make *beautiful music* but to foster self-expression and open up our children’s ears to the world around them.

Rhythm
The second component of music is rhythm. Rhythm defines and organizes the sound through a beat. For example, is the whistling of the teakettle long and steady or short and choppy? Is the child’s banging on the pot fast and upbeat or smooth and slow? In a painting, the rhythm would be the overall movement or flow of the composition. When you first look at the painting, where do your eyes go? Is the painting easy to look at or is it busy and annoying? This is its rhythm.

In our bodies, rhythm corresponds to our own internal body rhythm-our pulse and breath. If the musical beat is quick and steady, our heartbeat and body movements will mirror it. If we are tired, listening to African drumming can kick our body back into gear. On the other hand, if a two-year-old is running around out of control, slow rhythmic music like Bach or Vivaldi restores inner calm and slows most children down. Explore and add rhythm to the sounds that children make.

• Have your children play with different beats: fast, slow, steady, and erratic.

• Have them practice listening to the different rhythms around them, like the water dripping from the faucet or the ticking of a clock.

• Ask them if they can feel the vibration of a musical beat in their bodies, and if so, where? How do the different rhythms feel in their body? How do their feet want to move with the different beats?

• Try hand clapping to the rhythm of a poem and foot tapping to a favorite piece of music. These activities are every child’s favorite, free entertainment.

Melody
Finally there is melody. Melody corresponds to our emotions. It gives sound and rhythm its feeling and sensual quality. It is the part of music that expresses the hills and valleys of an individual’s experience. It goes straight to our heart and feeling center. Melody can uplift our spirit, calm us during times of stress, or move us to tears. Returning to the painting metaphor, melody would be the overall feeling that the painting evokes as we look at it. Does the painting draw us in and create a feeling of peace, excitement, distress, or discomfort? Introducing melody to the earlier sounds and rhythms will help children learn self-expression.

• Have them hum a tune or create a melody, adding emotion to sound.

• Experiment expressing sounds that are emotional: happy, sad, funny, etc.

Melody turns a sound into a personal and unique statement. By playing with sound, rhythm and melody our children discover a new vocabulary and tool to use for expression when words are hard to find.

We can use creativity and imagination to choose different styles of music by which our children can express their feelings, relax, stimulate their minds or allow their creative juices to flow. A variety of selections, rhythms, tones, and melodies allows children to develop their own musical tastes and sparks their natural curiosity to explore the world of music on their own.

About the Author
Dr. Caron Goode is a parenting expert who speaks and writes about how parents can nurture their children’s gift. Go to http://www.InspiredParenting.net to order *Nurture Your Child’s Gift, Inspired Parenting,* and sign up for the online parenting magazine. To discover your personal parenting styles, click on the Four Tool Every Parent Needs.

By Elizabeth Pantley, Author of No Cry Sleep Solution

The environment that your baby enjoyed for nine long months in the womb was not one of absolute quiet. There was a constant symphony of sound — your heartbeat and fluids rushing in and out of the placenta. (Remember those sounds from when you listened to your baby’s heartbeat with the Doppler stethoscope?) Research indicates that “white noise” sounds or soft bedtime music helps many babies to relax and fall asleep more easily. This is most certainly because these sounds create an environment more familiar to your baby than a very quiet room.

Many people enjoy using soothing music as their baby’s sleep sound. If you do, choose bedtime music carefully. Some music (including jazz and much classical music) is too complex and stimulating. For music to be soothing to your baby, pick simple, repetitive, predictable music, like traditional lullabies. Tapes created especially for putting babies to sleep are great choices. Pick something that you will enjoy listening to night after night, too. (Using a tape player with an automatic repeat function is helpful for keeping the music going as long as you need it to play.)

There are widely available, and very lovely, “nature sounds” tapes that work nicely, too, as well those small sound-generating or white-noise devices and clocks you may have seen in stores. The sounds on these — raindrops, a bubbling brook or running water — often are similar to those sounds your baby heard in utero. A ticking clock or a bubbling fish tank also make wonderful white-noise options.

“I went out today and bought a small aquarium and the humming noise does seem to relax Chloe and help her to sleep. I didn’t buy any fish though. Who has time to take care of fish when you’re half asleep all day?” Tanya, mother of 13-month-old Chloe.

You can find some suitable tapes and CDs made especially for babies or those made for adults to listen to when they want to relax. Whatever you choose, listen to it first and ask yourself: Does this relax me? Would it make me feel sleepy if I listened to it in bed?

If you must put your baby to sleep in a noisy, active house full of people, keeping the tape running (auto rewind) will help mask baby-waking noises like dishes clanking, people talking, siblings giggling, TV, dogs barking, etc. This can also help transition your sleeping baby from a noisy daytime house to which he’s become accustomed subconsciously to one of absolute nighttime quiet.

Once your baby is familiar with his calming noise, or music, you can use these to help your baby fall back to sleep when he wakes up in the middle of the night. Simply sooth him by playing the music (very quietly) during the calming and falling-asleep time. If he wakes and cries, repeat this process.

If your baby gets used to his sleep time sounds you can take advantage of this and take the tape with you if you will be away from home for naptime or bedtime. The familiarity of these sounds will help your baby sleep in an unfamiliar environment.

Eventually your baby will rely on this technique less and less to fall and stay asleep. Don’t feel you must rush the process; there is no harm in your baby falling asleep to these gentle sounds. When you are ready to wean him of these you can help this process along by reducing the volume by a small amount every night until you finally don’t turn the music or sounds on at all.

Babies enjoy these peaceful sounds, and they are just one more piece in the puzzle that helps you to help your baby sleep – gently, without any crying at all.

About the Author:
Elizabeth Pantley is the author of several books, including Gentle Baby Care : No-cry, No-fuss, No-worry — Essential Tips for Raising Your Baby, The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night, Kid Cooperation (with an introduction by William Sears, MD), Perfect Parenting, as well as her latest The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers and is also president of Better Beginnings, Inc. She is a popular speaker on family issues, and her newsletter, Parent Tips, is seen in schools nationwide. She appears as a regular radio show guest, and has been quoted in Parents, Parenting, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, American Baby, Working Mother, and Woman’s Day magazines. Visit Elizabeth’s web site http://www.pantley.com/elizabeth.