In a new study spanning three continents, researchers have found that encouraging caregivers to sing more frequently to their infants significantly improves babies' moods and enhances caregivers' emotional wellbeing.
Published in the journal Child Development, the study provides strong evidence that singing can be a low-cost, high-impact intervention for early childhood development.
The researchers explored whether using a music enrichment intervention program encourage parents to sing more frequently to their babies could improve the health of both infants and caregivers (as with skin-to-contact).
The study was conducted with 110 caregivers, primarily from the United States and New Zealand (with infants on average about 4 months old).
It was found that the intervention successfully increased the frequency of infant-directed singing, especially in soothing contexts, and led to measurable improvements in infants바카라™ general mood as reported by caregivers.
One interesting finding was how intuitively caregivers incorporated singing into soothing routines for their infants, even though the intervention did not explicitly instruct them to use singing for this purpose.
Among a dozen soothing strategies, singing was the only one that showed a significant increase in use following the intervention.
바카라œOur findings suggest that encouraging parents and caregivers to sing more frequently to their infants can have a positive, causal impact on infant mood.바카라
바카라œSinging is a universal practice바카라”parents from almost every culture and throughout history have intuitively used singing to soothe and connect with their infants,바카라 said the study conducted by an international team of researchers from Yale University, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Auckland, McGill University, the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, and Princeton University.
They further said that it바카라™s easy to do, requires no special equipment or training, and is accessible to everyone. 바카라œBecause infant mood is closely linked to parenting stress, caregiver-infant bonding, and later social-emotional development, such a simple intervention could have meaningful downstream benefits.바카라
The researchers have advised paediatricians and practitioners working with families to recommend more infant-directed singing to support healthy early development.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (US), the Royal Society of New Zealand, the University of Auckland, and Princeton University.
