The Power of Singing in Early Childhood: How Music Helps Your Child Learn and Grow
A lot of kids are musically inclined by nature. Even babies respond to rhythm and try to mimic musical sounds. The savvy parent will capitalize on that attraction to build their kids’ singing skills. When you connect with singing tutors online, you and your child will start your journey down this beneficial path.
Developing Spatial Awareness
Spatial awareness is the ability to place oneself in their environment and assess their position relative to everything around them. Spatial skills are vital in sports; knowing where teammates are on the soccer field helps them direct the ball where it needs to go, for instance. Hand-eye coordination, such as tracking a softball’s movement to connect it with the bat, is another example of spatial awareness.
Spatial skills are important academic tools, too. Being able to visualize boosts math performance and writing abilities. How does singing help with all of that?
Think about the environment one typically sings in. Singing too close to the accompanying instrument or amplifier risks drowning out the vocal work. Standing too far away from the microphone likewise degrades sound quality. However, the most important aspect is projection. Singers (and public speakers) develop an automatic process of measuring a venue’s size so they’ll know how strongly to project their voice.
Developing Posture
Some pop artists slouch over their guitar or keyboard but still manage to sing fairly well. However, most vocalists stand or sit straight, with shoulders back, their chest out and head held high. This posture gives their voice more power and gives them more control over their instrument.
Good posture is one of the first habits singing coaches instill. They will first work on core and abdominal strength, and then manipulate their student’s frame to optimize their singing ability. Your child will see immediate benefits from standing tall. First, they’ll discover how much more powerful they sound, and then they’ll realize a greater vocal range.
They’ll also discover new levels of confidence. The head-held-high posture certainly helps, and developing new abilities is the icing on the cake.
Developing Cognitive Skills
Cognitive skills include problem-solving, critical thinking, and reasoning, to name a few. Just listening to music helps build memory and increase attention span. Those two factors promote cognitive development, which paves the way for building logic and reasoning skills.
Learning how to sing fosters a virtuous learning cycle. Music is inherently mathematical, a quality that enhances your child’s natural sequencing and reasoning abilities. Those, in turn, will impact how your child thinks, analyzes situations, and solves problems.
As they advance through their musical training, they’ll expand on that type of intellectual processing. Such patterns of thinking will ground them in their academic endeavors, paving the way to success in school and in life.
Developing Ways to Express Oneself
Toddlers engage in ‘terrible twos’ behavior partly out of frustration. Kids that age lack effective ways to communicate what they want or need, and to express their ideas. How can singing lessons help?
Music is, by nature, expressive. Happy songs, sad songs, and sentimental songs all rouse our emotions; child singers experience those feelings, too. Vocal coaches are experts in helping the youngest singers express themselves through music. This gives parents a tool to help their children build their expressive qualities.
Emotional control is another benefit singing lessons deliver. Having control over one’s emotions is a skill even adults lack. Your child’s singing sessions will give them the tools they need to manage emotional storms throughout their lives.
Developing Language Skills
Some music genres prefer their singers to mumble lyrics but, as a whole, clear pronunciation is a necessary singing skill. Singing teachers are sticklers for diction; they spend many hours helping their pupils pronounce song lyrics correctly.
If your child is very young, say, just learning how to talk, singing lessons will help them build their vocabulary. As they learn new words, you can help your singers master how to use them in ordinary conversation. These exercises cover sentence building and proper grammar usage, too.
Developing Communication Skills
Much is made in the workplace about active listening and proper communication. What if you could arm your child with those skills early in their life? Musicians of all types, including singers, routinely tune their ears to key and tempo changes and to harmonize with other vocalists in the group.
During your child’s singing lessons, they will master the mechanics of listening and how to apply those skills. Fun songs like If You’re Happy and You Know It, following the instructions gives them immediate proof of their listening abilities.
All these skills, developed early in life, set your child on a path to success. They will apply all the qualities and abilities they develop while learning to sing.
