by Linda Silva
I believe music education should begin at birth. Personal experience and plenty of research demonstrate how much we benefit from music. But music education does not always mean sitting down at a piano and parsing the G from the C and the first finger of your right hand versus the fifth finger of your left. That’s decoding, a challenge in its own right but one that does not always lead to the best musical outcome. This is especially true if it’s started too soon and at the expense of more intrinsic concepts.
Children are built to make music, which is something parents notice and want to capitalize on. That’s great. But a good music lesson for an eight-year-old is not necessarily what’s good for a preschooler. Early childhood music should engage the whole child, so that it lights up every part of their brain.
What does age-appropriate music education look like?
Up through the ages of six or seven, it looks like a group that spends a lot of time singing and moving. Children love to use their bodies and voices. Not only is it fun, social, and cognitively on target, introducing music through classes that emphasize singing and movement solidifies the two things no musician can do without: pitch and rhythm. Pitch is learned by listening, imitating, and refining. Rhythm, or the ability to keep a steady beat, starts with your body. All good music flows from these two elements. Without them, nothing else matters.
So hold off on formal lessons and let your young child sing, dance, move, and listen. Put your child in a music class or a community or church music environment. Play an instrument or put on a song and let them sing and wiggle and bang along however they like. (And you do it too!) Give music a way in. Then later, when the time is right, it will find its way back out through an instrument, and beautifully.