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Why Shared Musical Play with Your Child Is So Important (And Ideas to Implement!)

Mom and 2-year-old son create musical play via singing and hand movements.

Music—whether you’re listening to it or playing it—has loads of benefits, but shared musical play (the act of making and reacting to music with another person) takes those benefits to the next level. Shared musical play is the ultimate multi-sensory experience that boosts cognitive, whole body, and social-emotional development, and supports critical grownup/child connection…all through PLAY! 

There’s research to prove why practicing shared musical play at home is absolutely essential to positive growth and family engagement during the early years.

So, what exactly does it say and how can you replicate it?

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How Music Teaches Kids to Self-Regulate

Kindermusik | How to Calm an Upset Child with Music

He’s so whiny. She’s a hitter. He cries non-stop. She can’t stop talking…if this sounds like your child(ren) or students, they’re not wild—they need help learning how to self-regulate.

When grownups are overstimulated or don’t get their way, we (usually) use tools like taking a deep breath or a walk to make sure we don’t lose it. When we self-regulate, we balance our nervous systems. That helps us access our prefrontal cortex, where logic lives.

When it comes to self-regulation in children, they’ve got two things working against them:

1) They’re born with biological tools to regulate their nervous systems, but they need practice and guidance to learn how to use them properly.

2) Their prefrontal cortex isn’t fully formed, so they need extra help to reach and dissect that logic.

Enter music!

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Baby’s Got the Beat! How to Add Rhythm to Your Daily Routine

You don't have to be a children's music teacher to use Kindermusik.

Babies are exposed to sounds during pregnancy. At birth, their sense of hearing is completely developed and their brains are programmed to find patterns, making their first year the best time to start exposing babies to music. Kindermusik’s curricula makes it fun and easy to teach music to babies and young children, and has the best educational activities for babies.

Steady beat is the foundation of all music (and language)! Babies first experience steady beat in the womb–listening to their mother’s heartbeat and feeling the rhythm of her steps. Kindermusik activities are carefully designed for a child to experience steady beat using multiple senses:

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Labor Day:  Wait, What Are We Celebrating Again?

For many of us, Labor Day is associated with the bittersweet emotions that accompany the end of summer. It’s the unofficial harbinger of fall, an excuse for retailers to hold massive sales, and traditionally, the rather arbitrary national deadline for wearing white. But Labor Day has far more significance—and a more sobering history—than its present-day observance would imply.

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How Back To School Ready Are You?

We wait all year for summer—our annual celebration of bare feet, beach outings, barbecues, and bathing suits—but no matter what, it always seems like it’s just too short. Making things worse is the fact that the better part of August—which should occupy prime summer real estate on our calendars—is spent preparing for summer to end! City pools are drained and locked. Summer camps shutter their cabins. The long, languorous, lightning-bug-filled days give way to frantic back-to-school preparations and end-of-summer closeouts.

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Sun’s Out, Shoes Off: Why Barefoot Is Best

It’s summer! Time to kick off your shoes, feel the grass beneath your toes, bury your feet in the sand, and do the scorched-foot tiptoe-dance on your way into the pool.

As the weather heats up and boots get shoved to the backs of closets, those pale feet that only a short time ago were in socks and closed shoes suddenly emerge on the scene, sporting new pedicures and refusing to be constrained by more than a flip-flop. For kids, running around with nothing but dirt, rocks, and grass underfoot is a time-honored summer tradition; the extra callouses and scrapes are just a small price to pay.

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“Summer Slide”: What You Should Know

child on slide in summer

Water slide, playground slide, Slip N Slide…nothing more perfectly conjures the feeling of summer fun and freedom. The smiles, the giggles, the breeze whipping through wild hair…

But for some parents, summer slide invokes less positive feelings. That’s because the term refers to the dreaded loss of school-based learning that occurs from the end of one school year to the beginning of the next. The phenomenon has led to calls for year-round schooling and intensive summer educational programs to combat the effects of this particular (and decidedly less delightful) slide.

But before we get all hot and bothered, let’s take a look at the facts.

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