Kids Making Music is Kids Creating Culture

While doing some last minute Christmas shopping last December, I was struck by how many children’s toys on the shelves are essentially TV or tablet screens. Lights flash, sounds blare, and pieces move, but they ultimately make children just observers of spectacle. Our kids don’t interact with toys like these — they don’t even use imagination with them — they simply consume them passively. And that passive consumption denies children opportunities to grow, learn, and be excited.

Society doesn’t always take children particularly seriously. Sure, we care about their safety and education, and we manufacture products to be purchased in their name, but we often don’t give their thoughts, abilities, and talents the level of attention we should. Given the opportunity, our kids can be not only part of society and culture but active contributors to it. Music helps them bring more of their hearts and minds to the world, and that benefits all of us.

When your son draws a bow across a string playing Nutcracker Suite, he knows he is playing a piece of music performed for generations, one that most people in his community know well. When your daughter rips a Queen guitar solo, with memories of those collective foot stomps in the gymnasium, she knows that she is taking her place in the ranks of the impossibly cool Rock n Roll.

Think of the power that gives our kids.

Think of how it makes them participants in a community.

We know that music-making increases the synaptic pathways in the human brain, increasing the amount of information that can be processed and the speed at which that information travels. It also increases memory and focus, as well as language skills. That translates into results that make us happy as parents: better communication skills, test scores, grades on report cards, social skills, and future job opportunities.

But music-making simultaneously increases opportunities for kids to succeed doing what they want (which, of course, also makes us happy). When our littlest ones first learn to tie their shoes, we sing their praises, and then they charge off to face the day full of confidence.

As parents, we are always on the lookout for ways our children can feel strong and brave, and playing music is an exceptionally beneficial way to do exactly that.

Because we know that feeling strong and brave isn’t just about feelings. Learning an instrument allows our kids to keep a human tradition of music making alive and well, but it also — by helping their brains grow stronger and more clever — increases their abilities to make all sorts of non-musical contributions, too. Albert Einstein said, “I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music,” and in The Republic, Plato writes, “Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other.”

A student’s contribution to the musical tradition rarely stops there. Your daughter who develops a passion for coding, for example, will be more creative and precise for having studied piano as a child (remember that window of neural plasticity!). Your son with a knack for business or diplomacy will have stronger interpersonal and language skills for having studied trumpet.

And that is a powerful lesson. What if every child grew up knowing that what she or he made — what came from their heart and mind — was valued and a vital part of the culture that they share with their family, classmates, peers, and neighbors? What if they all had firsthand experience in positively affecting the world now by contributing to the soundtrack that accompanies our lives from the car to the grocery to the airport to the job and on and on? That kind of empowerment is a rare thing for anybody (let alone a young person) to experience.

Related posts:

Where does confidence come from? Most people would say it comes naturally but it comes from experience. Experience helps you learn so much about the world and about yourself in so many ways. The more…

Serverless architecture for building web and mobile apps has become increasingly popular. Let's build a react application that connects to Firebase easily

Dynamics 365 CE SDK içeriğinde önemli noktaların Türkçe çevirileri, teknik yorumları ve .NET örneklerini bu yazı dizisinde bulabilirsiniz.