Music Therapy for early childhood development

My approach when working with preschool-aged children is affirming, play-based and child-led, offering a multi-sensory environment for children to explore through musical play.

Child-led approaches validate children’s expression of choices and preferences during therapy, to support children’s secure sense of self and interpersonal safety, while developing skills in self-advocacy.

Sessions usually include a range of musical play activities such as:

  • Playing, singing, actions/movement and dancing to favourite songs
  • Improvisation on a range of musical instruments, including sound effects to accompany imaginative play
  • Drumming
  • Sensory materials e.g. parachute play, bubbles, dancing ribbons/scarves, dress-ups
  • Books/sung stories

Sessions also provide ideas for parents and caregivers about how music can be integrated in daily routines to support children’s development in regards to communication, motor skills and sensory integration. (See Songs for Kids.)

Alice looking sideways and holding a Zenko tone drum, which she is playing with a wooden beater

Motor coordination and sensory integration

Regular engagement in music can support the development of fine and gross motor skills, rhythm, balance, coordination and integration of auditory, visual, tactile, proprioceptive and vestibular senses, through activities such as drumming, musical improvisation using a range of musical instruments, singing and movement/dancing.

A. Jean Ayres, whose work informed the establishment of the discipline of Occupational Therapy, posited that children will themselves seek out “just right challenges” – that is, activities providing the sensory and cognitive input required to nourish and develop the brain and nervous system (Ayres, 2005).

Speech and language development

By studying the interactions between mothers and infants, Malloch and Trevarthen (2009) found that early communication is innately musical, structured by qualities of pitch, timbre, and pulse (rhythm), prior to any language acquisition by the infant.

Parents and caregivers can support language development through music in children’s early years with familiar songs that engage attention, listening, interpersonal connection, play and imitation of gestures and movements.

Singing (in particular) can support speech development by encouraging auditory discrimination, vocalisation, production of speech sounds including consonants and phonemes, neural plasticity (engaging more regions of the brain than speech), memory and word retrieval, and a sense of control and predictability to counter an unpredictable world/environment.

A crocheted orca, great white shark, clownfish and blue octopus placed around a wooden treasure chest with seashells inside, with a yellow starfish on a shell near the chest.

PHOTOS BY MEGAN SPENCER

References

Ayres, A. J. (2005) Sensory Integration and the Child. Western Psychological Services.

Malloch, S., & Trevarthen, C. (Eds.). (2009). Communicative musicality: Exploring the basis of human companionship. Oxford University Press.