Singing Your Way Home

The Mother Child Connection
Developing an ideal mother-child relationship is the goal of every mother and the aim of every article written on the subject. The media tends to focus on the big titles and on the complicated required factors to create and maintain bonds but there are subtle and crucial things that can help. From the time of birth, infants prefer the sight of their mother’s face over any other face. They are also more responsive to natural maternal voices than any other stimuli. These two facts, proven by a large number of studies, urged us to ask a more interesting question: do infants prefer to hear their mom talk or sing? For proven positive impact on both you and your child, we suggest singing your way through their developing years.
Communication Station
To a large extent, studies show that infants are highly attentive to maternal speech and maternal singing, but are more engaged when the latter is used. Despite the ability of both to modulate the arousal levels of healthy infants, as reflected in salivary cortisol changes, this positive effect is more sustainable in the singing case. Deeper investigation on the differences between maternal singing and talking were carried out by psychologists and university professors Takayuki Nakataa and Sandra E. Trehub who compared the attentionrelated results of prolonged periods of maternal singing and speaking for infant listeners.
Interestingly, infants exhibited more overall fixation and a higher initial fixation coupled with a minimal body movement when listening to their mother’s singing. This suggests that infants are much more engaged when their mothers sing as opposed to listening to them speak. Singing can trigger an efficient process of gradual learning for children as the visual fixation patterns are thought to reflect patterns of information processing. This was concretely felt by mothers during weekly group sessions over a five year period, as part of the Peers Early Education Partnership (PEEP) project, where they recognized that infants less one year-old could, indeed, distinguish between different songs. If you feel like testing it yourself, listen carefully to your baby humming when you are singing a certain song!
Reap What You Sow
Maternal singing benefits don’t end at attention span. Not only does it enhance infant attention, facilitating and developing the interaction communication between the mother and the baby, it also regulates the child’s emotions and decreases feelings of distress. Simple melodies with repetitive word usage, recapped several times over, reassure the baby that someone is there to calm him or her and attend to needs. Mentioning the baby’s name over and over again in the song creates feelings of familiarity that makes the baby feel safe.The greatest benefit of maternal singing resides in the fact that it fosters bonds between the mother and her child. During singing periods, the baby’s emotions are heightened, while the mother’s emotions are intensified. In an interesting study published in the journal “Infant behavior and development”, a group of scholars examined the relationship between maternal attachment classification and their expressiveness while singing to infants. They concluded that the mothers who participated in the study, regardless of their attachment classification, sang more expressively in their children’s presence than in their absence, with voices characterized by higher pitches and greater emotional expressiveness. In parallel, singing was proven to increase the maternal feelings of mothers towards their babies and their feeling of attachment especially during the baby’s first year. In a survey conducted by professors from the University of Surrey-London, all of the 100 mothers who participated admitted singing to their children. The research was aimed at determining the attitudes of mothers towards their babies less than a year old.
Research indicated that music proves to be a more efficient vehicle to convey emotion especially for infants who can only relate to rhythm rather than to the actual meaning of language. It’s why it is safe to say that music is not only considered “an international language” but also a very sacred mother-child form of communication.
5 QUICK SINGSONG TIPS FOR MOMS
1. Start singing to your baby right from the moment he or she is born. This will prime your child from birth to enjoy both your voice and practice of singing.
2. Don’t hesitate to sing if you don’t have a “singing voice”. Babies are not concerned at all with perfect pitches or complicated melodies.
3. Use songs to promote daily routine. Songs such as, “This is the way we brush our teeth, brush our teeth, brush our teeth,” facilitate the compliance of your child to healthy activities.
4. Use songs that are coupled with hand motions to enhance your baby’s fine motor skills. “Itsy Bitsy Spider” is an ideal song for such a purpose.
5. Don’t hesitate to use personally tailored songs to express your baby’s wishes. It is a great way to build a feeling of trust between mother and child