In our lives as singers, we play numerous roles, both on stage and off. For many singers, the role of parent is a major part of the personal repertoire. Along with the challenging and beautiful requirements of this role is a tremendous opportunity for informal yet meaningful music making. In her book Songs in Their Heads: Music and Its Meaning in Children’s Lives, author Patricia Shehan Campbell posits that “Music appears to be everywhere in the lives of children, and they love the musical parts of their lives.”1
And in the homes of singer parents and their children, the concept of music being “everywhere” is a beautifully inescapable reality. Whether it’s in the form of a parent singing his aria package for a faux, furry casting panel made up of a toddler with a teddy bear assistant, or the sound of a voice student having a lesson in the other room, music making is a daily reality for every person in a singer parent’s household.
The benefits of raising a child in a musical household are hard to ignore, yet have been challenging to quantify and assess formally. A recent study published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly has removed some of that challenge. It provides new statistics and insight for the ongoing discussion centered on linking developmental progress with music making in the home, as well as additional social and emotional cognitive outcomes.
Findings from this study have direct application to what so many musician parents (and children of musician parents) have learned and experienced in their own homes. “Children, every one of them musical, deserve to be taken as far as their many ‘talents’ can carry them,” advises Campbell. “We teachers and parents are key players in this challenge.”2 The study sheds continuing light on just how much of a musically developmental role these key players truly have.
About the Study
The study, whose findings are published in the paper Associations between Early Shared Music Activities in the Home and Later Child Outcomes: Findings from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, drew its data from Growing Up in Australia: the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC), which included over 5,000 children from infancy to 12 months of age. Data was collected biennially using assessment tools for children and parents, including questionnaires, computer-assisted interviews, and direct assessments. The subsequent study, highlighted here, included over 3,000 participants and drew from the data collected when the infant group was ages 2–3 and then again at ages 4–5.
This study is centered on cognitive links and developmental associations between early shared book reading and shared music activities in the home. Parents in the study were asked to quantify how many times they had read to their child within the space of a week. Using the same response scale, parents were asked to report how many times they had shared a musical activity—including a song or a dance—with their child. The findings suggest the possibility of “a role for parent-child home music activities in supporting children’s development.”3
The study emphasizes the importance of location as it relates to early childhood cognitive and musical development. “A substantial body of literature has established the relations between the general quality of the home learning environment and positive academic and social outcomes for children,” the study reports. “The general quality of the home learning environment in the early years has been linked to a wide range of positive developmental outcomes for children including enhanced communication, language, and literacy skills, numeracy skills, school readiness, social and emotional skills including self-regulation, and fewer behavioral problems.”4
The study is a compelling read for anyone interested in how children develop musically in the home outside of more formalized musical development, such as private lessons or classes.
Practical Application
Much of the informal music making that occurs at home with young children is song based—an improvised song to help learn how to complete a task, to put clothes on in the correct order, or to remember to brush their teeth before bed. And because singer parents live so much of their working and teaching lives in some form of song, it’s empowering to know that the findings of this study further affirm that using critical components of their work and artistic lives—singing, improvising, etc.—have dual use at home.
To explore this a bit more outside of the study, I checked in with some friends ranging from an early childhood music education specialist, to a two-parent opera-singer family, to a celebrated Juilliard professor whose son, now grown up, is a recording artist and rock singer.
Flutist and Mother Carol Wincenc
My first call was to Carol Wincenc. Regarded as one of the international stars of the flute, Wincenc is a celebrated professor of flute at the Juilliard School and Stony Brook University. She also happens to be a terrific singer. Wincenc grew up in as musical a home as one can imagine, with a pianist mother and a conductor/concert violinist father. Her own son, Nicola Wincenc, is now grown up and the lead singer and guitarist of the popular New York City rock band Caverns.
With such a musically diverse family, I was curious to find out about the less formalized music making that went on in her home as she raised her son. “I sang to him constantly—a lot of new mothers do that,” Wincenc says. “He did hear me vocalizing. There was singing going on all the time, and he would hear me teaching flute lessons.”
Wincenc emphasizes the importance of incorporating coordination and rhythm and she fondly recalls putting on recordings in their home and acting them out. “We’d be Peter and the Wolf,” she remembers.
“Just keep singing to your kids, from day one,” Wincenc advises new parents. “It’s essential for their brain development.”
Parents and Singers Tamaron and Natalie Conseur
Soprano Natalie Conseur and her husband, baritone Tamaron Conseur, are active on stage as singers and at home as parents of three little ones: Julian (7), Claire (4½), and Daniel (1). With the spacing between each child, Natalie and Tamaron could run their own study, collecting data every two or three years—similar to the study highlighted in this article—to gauge development and trends with their own sampling of adorable subjects.
Natalie is one of my dearest friends, and I love having any reason to call her. Yet knowing how busy she and her family are—like so many other singer parent households—I got right to the point and asked her about music making in the Conseur home. “We’re singing all the time,” she tells me. “We’ll be at the dinner table and Claire will say, ‘Let’s play Guess the Music!’ She’ll start humming, and whoever guesses the song correctly gets to pick the next one.”
When I ask about musical meaning in her household, Natalie says how important it’s been for her to keep singing as much as she can. Like so many singers, Natalie maintains a job that isn’t centered on singing and she balances its demands with the details and responsibilities of a multi-child household and her singing work. Both she and Tamaron sing with the Chicago Symphony Chorus.
“I feel a little guilty,” she confides, referring to being away from their kids while making the commute into the city, in addition to the time spent in rehearsal and performance, “but it’s so fulfilling to me. It makes me a better parent and it brings more joy to our kids’ lives, that mommy and daddy love to sing. It’s a fun and wonderful part of our lives.”
Natalie’s charge to singer parents is similar to Wincenc’s. “Don’t stop singing,” she says. “They hear you singing and see you go off to sing. Your example is a wonderful thing for the kids.”
Music Education Specialist Cynthia Nasman
Making up songs is a critical component in a child’s process to develop and cope, both musically and personally. To address sung, musical improv and its role in the home, I reached out to my friend Cynthia Nasman, adjunct instructor of music education at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington. She has shared her musical talents (voice, flute, guitar—you name it!) with countless children in the Pacific Northwest and now teaches, mentors, and guides future music educators as they prepare to begin their teaching journeys.
When I called her to talk about the topic of this article, she immediately brought up her granddaughter, Astrid. Nasman speaks enthusiastically, yet quietly, as not to wake Astrid (age 3), who happened to be in the backseat of her car when I called a few days before Christmas. “Astrid hears her favorite piece—the March from The Nutcracker—and she says, ‘Oh this is my favorite!’” Nasman says, “and then she secretly hums along and then makes up and sings words that that we can’t understand. She doesn’t know that we’re listening, otherwise she’d stop.”
Nasman’s enthusiasm for the topic of children’s musical development and cognition is infectious. And when I ask her to talk about informal music making in her home as she raised her three children, it becomes clear that she, too, had her own in-home lab for a series of informal studies. One particular time, Nasman was charged with teaching numerous children of varying ages. Her own kids were 5, 8, and 10 years old and in kindergarten, third grade, and fifth grade. So she tried out her lesson plans and classroom activities on her kids at home, observing how they reacted and responded to various musical activities and styles at different ages.
In addition, as her children were growing up, she made sure to always have music playing. “We listened to classical, pop, a little country, religious music, and jazz,” she recalls with a laugh. “I exposed them to so many genres that at one time when they were all teenagers, they all came to me—they’d been talking about this—and told me that it was hard for them to find a form of rebellion. There wasn’t a style or genre we hadn’t all shared together.”
For those actively engaged in singing and music making, the links this study finds between childhood development and shared, improvisatory musical activities may seem obvious. But a little qualitative data never hurt to inspire us to seek out even more musical opportunities in our own homes. Ask questions of yourself like those posed in the survey: “Have I sung to/with my child yet today?” “Have we danced this week?” “Have we made up a song together recently?”
Because, after all, what might seem like the most natural of home activities can actually have the greatest long-term impact on our children’s lives.
Endnotes
1 Campbell, Patricia Shehan. Songs in Their Heads: Music and its Meaning in Children’s Lives (Oxford University Press, 1998), 168.
2 Ibid, 171.
3 Williams, K.E., M. S. Barrett, G.F. Welch, V. Abad, and M. Broughton. “Associations between Early Shared Music Activities in the Home and Later Child Outcomes: Findings from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children,” Early Childhood Research Quarterly, no. 31 (2015): 113.
4 Ibid: 114.
