The Power of Music in Childhood Development

The role of music in childhood development concerns how singing, listening and playing music shape children’s thinking, emotions, relationships and sense of identity. Sociologists approach the topic differently from psychologists, because they ask not only what music does to the individual child but also who has access to music, how children use it in their own cultures, and how it reflects and reproduces social differences. The wider field is introduced in the sociology of music.

What is the role of music in childhood development?

Music is among the first forms of culture that most children encounter. Babies are sung to, children join in nursery rhymes and playground songs, and by adolescence music is a central part of identity and peer life. Claims about its benefits tend to fall into four areas: cognitive skills such as language, memory and reasoning; emotional development, including the expression and regulation of feeling; social development, including cooperation and belonging; and cultural development, including learning the traditions and tastes of a community. Each area has some support, though the evidence is stronger for some than for others, and sociologists emphasise that benefits depend on social conditions and not only on music itself.

Does music make children smarter?

The most popular claim is that music improves intelligence. It began with a 1993 study in the journal Nature by Frances Rauscher and colleagues, which reported that university students performed better on a spatial reasoning task after listening to a Mozart sonata for ten minutes. The finding was widely reported as the Mozart effect, and it led to products and policies aimed at babies. Later reviews, however, found that the effect was small and short-lived, and that it was not confined to Mozart. It was a result for adults and not children, and it should not be taken as evidence that listening to classical music raises the intelligence of babies.

A separate question is whether learning an instrument has cognitive benefits. Glenn Schellenberg’s 2004 study in Psychological Science randomly assigned six year olds to keyboard lessons, voice lessons, drama lessons or no lessons, and found modest greater gains in IQ among the music groups than in the group with no lessons, although drama also had benefits in some areas. By contrast, a 2013 study by Samuel Mehr and colleagues, which tested brief music classes for preschool children in two randomised trials, found no consistent evidence of wider cognitive benefits. A large meta-analysis by Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet, published in 2020, concluded that when studies were of high quality, the effect of music training on general cognitive and academic skills was close to zero. The evidence therefore suggests that music is valuable in itself and that bold claims of improved intelligence are not secure. This is relevant for sociology because such claims are often used to justify music in schools in terms of exam results, which raises the question of whether the arts should have to prove economic or academic value.

Another strand of research concerns music and language. Studies of rhythm and pitch suggest that children who are good at hearing differences in sound may find it easier to learn to read, and some early reading programmes use song and rhyme for that reason. These findings are better established than claims about general intelligence, but they too are correlations that do not show that music teaching causes better reading, and the sociological point remains that the children most able to benefit are often those with the most resources at home.

What are the emotional and social benefits of music?

Susan Hallam’s 2010 review, titled The Power of Music, argued that active engagement with music can contribute to the intellectual, social and personal development of children and young people, including self-esteem, teamwork and perseverance, while also noting that the quality of the experience matters and that poor teaching can have the opposite effect. Studies of group music-making, such as in choirs and bands, suggest that shared performance can build a sense of belonging and cooperation, because participants must listen to each other and coordinate. This links to Durkheim’s argument about the role of shared ritual in creating solidarity, covered in the post on shared values and social solidarity.

Emotion is a second area. The psychologist Sandra Trehub’s research on infant-directed singing shows that lullabies and songs are used across cultures to soothe and bond with babies. Tia DeNora’s Music in Everyday Life, published in 2000, used a sociological approach to argue that people use music as a resource to regulate mood and to build identity, and the same applies to children, who may use favourite songs to calm themselves or to mark who they are. The link between music and feeling is explored in the transformative power of music.

How do children learn culture through music?

Music is also a way in which children are socialised. Through songs, they learn language, stories and values, and through school assemblies, religious services and national events they learn the music of their community. The relationship between music and socialisation more generally appears in music and socialisation, and music’s place alongside other forms of media in early life in primary socialisation. The family is the first setting, as set out in the role of families in primary socialisation.

Children are not just recipients. The new sociology of childhood, associated with Allison James and Alan Prout in 1990, treats children as active participants in creating their own culture. Iona and Peter Opie’s studies of children’s lore, such as The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren in 1959, recorded the chants, rhymes and skipping songs that children pass to each other without adult help, and these show a musical culture that spreads among peers across generations. In adolescence, music becomes tied to youth culture and to subcultures, as young people use styles of music to mark their identity and to separate themselves from adults. The way children learn this is explained in part by George Herbert Mead’s account of play and the game, in which children learn roles by taking on the perspectives of others, summarised in Mead’s contribution to symbolic interactionism.

Who gets access to music education?

A distinctive sociological question is who has the chance to learn music. Pierre Bourdieu argued in Distinction in 1979 that taste in music and the arts is bound up with class, and that familiarity with high culture works as cultural capital which helps middle-class children in education. Private lessons and instruments cost money, and surveys of music participation in Britain have repeatedly found that children from better-off families are more likely to learn an instrument. Reports from music education organisations have also documented cuts in specialist teaching and falling numbers taking music at GCSE and A level in recent years, so that school provision, which should offer a chance to all, is thinner in many places. Richard Peterson and Roger Kern argued in 1996 that elite taste has shifted from snobbery to omnivorousness, with high-status people enjoying a wide range of music, though access to the most valued forms still tends to depend on resources.

The programme known as El Sistema, founded in Venezuela in 1975 by Jose Antonio Abreu, which provides free orchestral training to children from poor areas, has been widely admired and copied. Geoffrey Baker’s critical study, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth, published in 2014, argued that claims for its social benefits were often exaggerated and that its authoritarian methods deserved scrutiny, which shows the importance of evaluating such projects with evidence and not with enthusiasm. The relationship between music education and politics is also covered in the role of music education in shaping societies and politics.

Examples of music in childhood

Everyday examples include singing lullabies, nursery rhymes at nursery, hymns and songs at school assemblies, and playground clapping games. Formal examples include instrument lessons, school choirs and youth orchestras. Children now meet music through streaming services, video platforms and games as well, which raises questions about commercial influence and the way popular culture is marketed to young people. Music also appears in the ceremonies of childhood, such as birthdays and festivals, a theme in the post on Christmas and childhood.

What are the criticisms and limits of the claim that music aids development?

The first limit is the problem of selection. Children who study music are often from advantaged homes where parents already read to them and support their schooling, so correlations between music and success may reflect background and not music. Randomised studies address this but are usually small and short. The second is that evidence of benefits is often exaggerated in policy debates, as the story of the Mozart effect shows, and sociologists warn against treating music as a tool for improving test scores. Third, benefits depend on the quality and nature of the experience. Pressure, competition and poor teaching can produce anxiety and make children give up, and the associated costs can widen inequalities. Fourth, the developmental psychology approach, which treats childhood as a series of stages such as those described by Piaget in the post on the concrete operational stage, may overlook the way that children shape their own musical lives. Finally, some critics, following Theodor Adorno’s argument that the culture industry standardises taste, worry that commercial music teaches children to be consumers more than creators.

Why does music in childhood matter in sociology?

It matters because music is a window on how culture is passed on, how children take part in making it, and how access to cultural resources is unequal. The topic links socialisation, identity, class and the sociology of childhood in one subject, and it provides a good test of how far claims about benefits are supported by evidence. In an answer, students should set out the claimed benefits, assess them using the research on cognitive effects, draw on Bourdieu and the new sociology of childhood to discuss access and agency, and conclude with a balanced view. The broader treatment of the sociology of childhood is in understanding childhood in sociology.