Listening to music contributes to the development of infants and children because the harmony of sounds stimulates hearing and speech as well as intellectual, sensory and motor development. In addition the benefits of musical stimulation for child development include:
- Easier to speak the words correctly;
- Greater ability to learn syllables and the alphabet;
- Facilitates learning of mathematics and foreign languages;
- It improves affective development and motor coordination.
Babies begin to hear inside their mothers' belly and the more music they hear, the better their intellectual development will be. Check out some stimulating sounds for newborn babies.
The importance of musical stimulation
The sooner the music is introduced into the child's environment, the greater its potential to learn because children who live surrounded by words acquire fluently and clearly speaking more easily and quickly.
Parents can leave children's songs for the baby to hear while he plays and watch video clips with children's singers is also a good strategy to stimulate child development. In addition, the music inside kindergarten and kindergarten already helps the child to develop better. However, the most appropriate songs are the children's songs that talk about animals, nature and friendship that teach to do good and are easy to rhyme.
When the child can start playing musical instruments
In preschool and in the first cycle it is already possible for the child to have music lessons, which are called musical education and although the children may show interest in learning a musical instrument like drums or percussion even before 2 years of age, it is from of the 6 years that they can begin to take classes with instruments that must be appropriate for their age, so that they are able to reproduce the activities that the professor indicates.
Instruments that require less motor skill and therefore are easier for the child to learn to play are drums and percussion instruments. As the child grows and having better motor control and fine motor skills, the easier it will be to learn to play piano and wind instruments.
Before this phase the most indicated classes are those of musical initiation where it will learn to reproduce sounds and to learn small children's songs that contribute to its growth and musical development.
In people who play musical instruments the whole brain is also stimulated, especially when it is necessary to follow a score or the figures of a song because to read both the staff and the score one has to use the vision, which will stimulate the brain movements to perform the movements necessary to play the instrument, and there are innumerable brain connections per second.
However it is not every child who has desire and facility to master an instrument and so parents should not force the child to study music if he shows no interest in it. Some children just enjoy listening to songs and dancing and this is normal and does not mean that it will develop less than children who are interested in musical instruments.
