You’ve got the music in you. Have you thought about writing a song about it?
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.
Watching our children make these memories is fascinating, and sometimes surprising depending on what songs they take a special liking to! We can share some of our musical memories, and encourage our children to listen to a variety of genres to discover their passions.
Another way to bring music into your family life is to create it yourself. You’ve probably been singing rhymes, songs and lullabies for years now, but have you considered collaborating to write your own songs to celebrate important moments, or help process tricky ones?
Songwriting is often used as part of music therapy to help the writer connect to psychosocial, emotional, cognitive and communication needs.[1] It offers another way to think about events or emotions, and new ways of expressing yourself.
When children experience big events, or find things difficult, it can help to talk about what happened and how they felt. This can be done through narrating it as a story as a way to process the event and the feelings it brought up.[2] Singing about things is simply another way to do this and may appeal to some children more than retelling on its own.
Remember, this is not going to competing for a Grammy! You can be as silly, awkward and badly-rhymed as you like. You don’t even have to create a whole song from scratch, if you prefer you can adapt songs you know to make them all about getting ready for nursery, visiting a friend or remembering a beloved pet. We definitely recommend using a familiar tune, whether it's from a rock song or a nursery rhyme.
Children are naturally creative and will have lots of ideas for songs. You can make some suggestions to get them thinking, or invent some examples before you sit down to compose a song together. As you and your child build the song ask them to think about rhymes or finding another way to phrase things for the next line.
Once you have created your song, sing it together and give time to talk about how it makes you both feel. You might find your child making little changes to the song over time, or questioning the choices to reflect their thinking process.
If you find a specific time of day especially tricky, perhaps a move from the house to the car, or cleaning teeth, you could write a song together about the process and make a habit of singing it as part of the routine to get through that time of day.
If you find writing your own family songs useful, or even want to share what you and your child have come up with, we would love to hear about them on our Community Facebook Group, My First Five Years Community.
References
[1] Baker, F and Wigram, T. (2005) Songwriting: Methods, Techniques and Clinical Applications for Music Therapy Clinicians, Educators and Students. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
[2] Diegel, D and Payne Bryson, T. (2012) The Whole Brain Child. London: Little, Brown Book Group