‘Babies would choose Mum or Dad over Pavarotti’: Why we should sing to our children
Elizabeth McCashin, a Raheny-based mum-of-three, sings different songs to each of her children. Her go-to song with six-year-old Cian is ‘Rainbow Connection’ from The Muppets. “It’s a lovely lullaby,” says the primary schoolteacher who’s currently on work leave.
With four-year-old Laoise, she sings songs from Frozen. “She was born just after Frozen II came out, and there’s a lullaby sung by the mother character — ‘All Is Found’ which I love.” And with her youngest, Tomás, 15 months, Elizabeth loves to sing much more active songs, like ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ and ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’.
Elizabeth grew up in a house where singing was — and still is — consistent. “My mother sang all the time. My grandfather lived with us until I was 12 and he sang all the time too. It was massively important to me that I’d continue this with my children.”
Cian, her firstborn, struggled with sleeping. “I tried everything to get him to sleep, so I was singing to him from his earliest days.”
Tomás has a rare genetic disorder, Prader-Willi syndrome, and spent his first seven weeks in the neonatal ICU.
“During those long days in NICU, I sang to him quite a bit. For me, it was a way for him to hear my voice, a way of continuing to communicate. There wasn’t a lot of response in the early days, but as he got stronger, I could definitely see he loved when I sang to him.”
Singing was also a way to fill the silence. “When you’re on your own with a child, the silence can be profound. You hear a lot about reading stories and that’s wonderful. But you can sing anytime, you don’t have to sit down to do it, you could be singing while you’re doing your jobs.”
After her middle child, Laoise, was born, Elizabeth did a Sing to Your Baby class at the Irish Institute of Music and Song.
“I was trying to ensure I had time just for Laoise. And I knew I’d learn new songs. I liked the theory behind it, that you could have songs for play, for movement, for sleep,” says Elizabeth, who found she sang lots of calm, soothing songs to her first two children to help them sleep.
“Whereas with Tomás, the songs were to get him active, stimulated, playing.”
The ‘Sing to Your Baby’ courses comprise five or six classes and the babies are generally aged from six weeks to about one year. Gilbert says classes are open to whoever is part of the loving-the-baby family.
“It’s mostly mums who come but we’ve had dads and grannies,” says Rebecca Gilbert, who heads up the Early Years Music department at the Irish Institute of Music and Song.
She always reassures parents that their baby wants to hear them more than they want to hear anyone else.
Babies don’t mind whether you can sing or not — they just want to hear your voice because Mum and Dad are their favourite people in the world.
“Babies would choose Mum or Dad or Granny over Pavarotti. And they prefer to hear their own people’s voice because that’s the communication that’s so important to them.”
In fact, says Gilbert, babies prefer the human voice singing without accompaniment by an instrument. She points to a study published online by Cambridge University Press three years ago that found six-month-olds preferred listening to sung rather than instrumental melodies.
“All the way up to when they’re six years old, their attention span increases when the music is just a human voice singing. It shows just how focused babies are on the human voice.”
Generations of songs
Gilbert usually begins courses by asking parents about the songs they knew as children, or whether they remember their mum, dad or auntie singing to them.
“I want to give people a repertoire of songs, easy things to know and love. We focus on nursery rhymes, songs like that. Singing these repetitive, gentle songs is great for language development because they teach children the rhythm and rhyme of our language. It’s why they appear in cultures all across the world.”
Indeed a very recent study suggests that parents should speak to their babies using sing-song speech, like nursery rhymes, as soon as possible. And this is because babies learn languages from rhythmic information, not phonetic information, in their first months.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin investigated babies’ ability to process phonetic information during their first year. Published in the journal Nature Communications, the study found that phonetic information wasn’t successfully encoded until seven months old and was still sparse at 11 months when babies began to say their first words.
“Parents should talk and sing to their babies as much as possible, or use infant-directed speech like nursery rhymes because it will make a difference to language outcome,” said Cambridge neuroscientist Professor Usha Goswami.
If you were to pass by the room where the Sing to Your Baby class is taking place, you might hear lullabies like ‘Hush Little Baby Don’t You Cry’, ‘Rock-A-Bye Baby’, ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, or more active songs like ‘The Wheels on the Bus’. And if you were to pop in for a moment, you’d see – says Gilbert – “all of us sitting together, babies lying on their blankets, parents on chairs or cushions, singing nursery rhymes together”.
Of course, the babies cry, she says. “That’s just part of life. And there’s great community, great help, in a room like that where all the new parents are just looking to make life easier for each other.”
The ‘serve and return’ holy grail of interaction between parent and infant
Dr Anne-Marie Casey, senior clinical psychologist at CHI’s (Crumlin) paediatric psychology department, confirms that CHI’s four music therapists have created sound banks of pre-recorded songs for parents.
“And we have a list of songs, of lullabies, up in the wards — all the ones you’d recognise: ‘Incy Wincy Spider’, ‘Pitter-Patter, Pitter-Patter’. It’s a gentle reminder to parents that – even when hospitalisation interrupts parenting – they will always have their voice.”
What the baby gets from this, says Casey, is all in that ‘serve and return’ holy grail of interaction between parent and infant.
“When you’re singing to your baby, you’re not behind a phone. There’s no ‘still face’. You’re showing emotion, you’re smiling, your infant is smiling back. Your infant is engaged, they’re paying attention to your face and they’re giving back a little of what they’re seeing.”
Casey points to research which found that a baby’s levels of cortisol (stress hormone) reduced after listening to their mother singing. “It reduced agitation in the infant’s body.”
And she also cites an Australian study, which found women felt safer and calmer when singing lullabies to their baby.
Gilbert likewise was struck by a university study from Canada that found babies who are exposed to music sleep more and smile more.
“We’re always looking to alleviate parental stress. And to think that singing lullabies can have such a positive effect on parents — and a knock-on impact on babies,” says Casey.
In Raheny, Elizabeth McCashin says singing with your baby can change the mood very quickly. “It improves the mood when things are going a little haywire. In chaotic situations, you can certainly calm things.”
In Raheny, Elizabeth McCashin knows that singing with and to her babies creates a connection, a bond.
“Especially if you sing to them at night. At six years of age, Cian still likes his cuddles and his song. When you’re doing something with regularity, it gives children a memory of a safe space. When you’re singing the same songs all the time, it makes them feel grounded.”