Music and Movement for Babies and Toddlers: Why It Matters More Than the Flashcards

Three of my four kids play an instrument, and I have never once paid for a lesson.

Piano and guitar, all self-taught, in a house where the music is on from the time we’re up. My five-year-old sits down at the piano every day without being told, and I’d love to tell you that was a plan, but it wasn’t. It was an instrument she was allowed to touch, music always playing, and a mother who didn’t turn it into a lesson. If you came here for a list of music and movement activities for your baby, you’ll get one, in prose, further down. The reason most parents search for it is usually a product someone sold them, so that comes first.

Why music matters for babies (the real reason, not the Mozart one)

In the 1990s a study found that college students who listened to ten minutes of Mozart did slightly better on a spatial reasoning task for about fifteen minutes afterward, and within a few years a whole industry had turned that into “classical music makes babies smarter.” Governors handed out CDs to newborns. A company sold millions of baby videos on the promise. In 2010 a team at the University of Vienna pooled about forty studies and more than three thousand participants and found no support for the idea that listening to Mozart raises anybody’s ability at anything. The effect was never about Mozart and it was never about babies, and the products built on it were marketing with a cello on the cover.

What the research does say is more interesting. In 2016 Christina Zhao and Patricia Kuhl at the University of Washington took thirty-nine nine-month-olds and gave half of them twelve fifteen-minute play sessions over a month in which parents and babies tapped and bounced to music in a waltz rhythm. The other half played without music. Afterward, the music babies’ brains responded more strongly to disruptions in rhythm, and not just in music: in speech. Moving to a beat with a parent had sharpened the baby’s ability to detect patterns in the sounds people make when they talk, which is the foundation of language. Not listening. Moving, with you, to a rhythm.

So the mechanism is this. A baby who is bounced, swayed, sung to and clapped with is practicing pattern detection with her whole body, and that practice transfers to language, to attention, to the sense of timing that underlies everything from conversation to reading. That’s why music and movement belong together in the phrase and why the “movement” half is not optional. A speaker in the corner playing Baby Einstein is not this. You are this.

What it looks like in my house

Music, all day, out loud. We have it on Alexa from morning on, every kind, and nobody decided that was educational; it’s just how the house sounds. Movement the same way: we dance in the kitchen, the kids do little workouts, there are sports and bikes and long walks, and none of it is scheduled as “music and movement time.” It’s woven in. And then, at some point, three of them picked up instruments and taught themselves, which is the part people find hard to believe. The instruments were there. They were allowed to touch them. Nobody made it a lesson, and nobody made it a chore, and the music they’d been soaked in gave them an ear to work from. My five-year-old practices daily for the same reason she eats breakfast: it’s a thing she does, because she wants to, and because nothing about it has ever been attached to a reward or a reminder.

The one tool-shaped exception is an app on my husband’s iPad that two of the kids use to learn music, as a tool, the way you’d use a tuner. It’s not a screen activity. It’s the equivalent of sheet music that talks back, and when the practice is done, the iPad goes away.

Music and movement activities for infants and toddlers (in prose)

Since this is what you typed, here’s the list, written as a description of an ordinary day rather than a set of activities.

For a baby, from birth: sing to her, badly, often, with your face close. Hold her and sway to whatever’s playing, and change the rhythm sometimes. Bounce her gently on your knee to a beat and stop at the end of a phrase so she learns to expect the stop. Clap her hands together to a song. Let her hear you hum while you do things. Around six months, give her something that makes a sound when she hits it: a wooden spoon and a pot, a shaker, a drum made of anything. By nine months, which is the age in the Washington study, you can sit on the floor and tap along to a song together, and that’s the whole intervention.

For a toddler, add her feet. Dance with her, then dance near her and let her do her own thing. Marching, stomping, spinning, freezing when the music stops and going when it starts. Give her real instruments if you can (a ukulele, a small keyboard, a hand drum) and don’t show her how to use them. Sing the same songs over and over, because the repetition is the point. Put the music on and let her move however she wants while you make dinner, and resist the urge to turn it into a lesson about rhythm or colors or counting. It is already a lesson about rhythm. It doesn’t need your narration.

And for both: a house where music is on and a grown-up who sometimes dances badly in the kitchen is worth more than any class.

What classes and apps are actually for

A baby music class is for the parent. A room full of adults singing with their babies is a good place to be on a Tuesday morning, and if it gets you singing at home, it’s done its job. But the class is not where the development happens. The development happens in the eleven thousand minutes a week when you’re not in the class, and a parent who leaves the music to the class has outsourced the one part that matters. Same for apps and toys with buttons: a toy that plays the song for her has taken the singing out of her mouth and the beat out of her body, and what’s left is watching.

The flashcards, the “educational” CDs, the sixty-dollar musical learning tables: that’s the Mozart effect, still being sold two decades after it was debunked, to parents who were told that development is a product. It isn’t. It’s you, and a beat, and a baby who wants to be held.

One thing

Tonight, put on a song you actually like, pick your baby up, and dance through one whole track without checking your phone. Then do it again tomorrow.

I write every week about what childhood is for and how to protect it from the things built to fill it. You can find me on Instagram or join the list.

Sources

• Zhao TC, Kuhl PK, “Musical intervention enhances infants’ neural processing of temporal structure in music and speech,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(19), 2016. 39 nine-month-olds; 12 fifteen-minute sessions over a month; music group (20) showed stronger neural responses to rhythm disruptions in both music and speech. Link
• Pietschnig J, Voracek M, Formann AK, “Mozart effect–Shmozart effect: A meta-analysis,” Intelligence 38(3), 2010. ~40 studies, 3,000+ participants; no support for a Mozart-specific gain in spatial ability. Link
• Rauscher FH, Shaw GL, Ky KN, “Music and spatial task performance,” Nature 365, 1993 (the original “Mozart effect” study: 36 college students, ~10–15 minute effect).