Today Tile Triggered Content

The beat of a piece of music can be likened to a heartbeat, keeping time all the way from beginning to end. Marching around to the beat of music, feeling the rhythm as they go, has many benefits for children. Their body and mind are working together as your child stays aware of the beat and marches in time. 

Music is woven into the fabric of our lives. Listening, playing, dancing (things most of us enjoy all our lives) start here: marching or dancing around your home to the beat of a song. 

We asked our My First Five Years community what key advice they would give for the early days of parenthood, and this is what they told us... 

Much of the research we read about babies involves studies of mothers and babies, with fathers often left out of the picture. But increasingly, researchers are including dads in their work and finding more about the ways everyone who cares for your baby plays an important role in their development.   

In 2014, Adrienne Burgess, CEO and head of research at the Fatherhood Institute, outlined five myths about dads, which (in most cases) are untrue.^[1]  

Music is magical. It has the power to move us to joy and sorrow, to bring back memories, to make us move and dance and to let us sing out loud – whether we’re alone or not. Many occasions in our lives are accompanied by music, and a song can bring us back to a particular moment in time. But does it also play a part in your child’s development?  

Your child will have been hearing the music they’re surrounded by since before they were even born, and as they’ve grown you might have noticed they have a preference for certain songs or rhythms. They may even be enjoying singing along, or making up their own words, to favourites.  

Your baby is beginning to recognise the names of some body parts.  

This fantastic book has a strong social and emotional theme. The story focuses on how one butterfly is unkind to Clara, and they are judgmental about her appearance. At the end of the story though, Clara emerges as a hero, and sends a wonderful message of you can still be kind to those who are not kind to you. It celebrates that we are all different and all special. 

Clara the Caterpillar offers up lovely vocabulary, some of which may be new to your child and require a little extra thought. It features words such as, ‘crestfallen,’ ‘camouflaged’ and ‘crimson,’ and provides tons of opportunities for you to pause and chat about the illustrations or language. 

We are surrounded by images on social media – often filtered, carefully staged photographs which can make us feel perfection is required at all times. As you adjust to parenthood, you might not feel you want a record of your bleary-eyed moments. 

We often think about how to focus our child’s attention, often believing we need to direct their gaze to one item or another, and make sure that they are looking at what they need to see in order to learn. But did you know that a big part of learning to focus on something involves learning to ignore everything else?  

This is called figure-ground perception – the ability to tune out what is not important to focus on the thing you’re interested in. When thinking about what we see, it’s visual figure-ground perception. 

Have you noticed your child enjoying some rough and tumble, physical play recently? For lots of us it’s worrying as we worry our child will get hurt, or hurt someone else. From tickling games to superhero role play, and all kinds of games involving racing around and crashing into each other, children are often drawn to this type of play. But why? And should you be worried or stop it just in case it causes tears?  

Rough and tumble is a way for children to playfully explore their bodies, boundaries and abilities. 

Many of us have music we associate with a specific season of our lives, or even with a single moment. Your child is learning to create these connections too and will soon have a bank of songs they connect to particular experiences or events.