Their infants lay on cushions or are worn in slings, their toddlers shake eggs and tambourines as they roll and totter around the rugs. Private song is a vehicle for learning, processing, creating and expressing in toddlerhood.Įvery Monday afternoon a group of mothers gather for Mamasing in a small studio at the back of a baby shop in Essex. Through the simple act of listening, these adults were awakened to what was meaningful to their children. For many of the parents who participated, awareness of their toddler's private singing caused them alter their daily parenting practices to share more music with their children. Reflections of communicative musicality were evident in the private reflections of 5 toddlers who sang about musical communications that they shared with their parents during the day. In line with the literature on general vocalizations, these toddlers sang to reflect, experiment, learn, express emotion, self-soothe and make sense of their recent experiences. The observed musical utterances included free-flowing vocalizations, re-working of learned songs and fully improvised songs. Results showed that all of the toddlers spontaneously vocalized to some degree in their private pre-sleep moments. Each of these types of data were pooled to create profiles of each child and to examine the existence of patterns across cases. Parent/family interviews were conducted at the beginning and end of the study. The parents also collected audio recordings of each session. For the first 15 minutes of each observation, the parents stood outside the child's bedroom and described and contextualized what they heard on a researcher-developed form. The parents (co-researchers) observed their children twice a week for four weeks. In this collective case study, I sought to investigate and describe nine toddlers' pre-sleep musical vocalizations. Although evidence of spontaneous singing has been documented in studies during the pre-sleep period, researchers have only interpreted the data from a linguistic perspective. Toddlers, who do not yet have the ability to internalize their thoughts often verbalize their thinking out loud in the private moments before sleep. The experiences of toddlerhood are filled with wonder as toddlers begin to walk, talk and make sense of the world around them. These spontaneous vocalizations often highlight experiences and events that are meaningful to the children who sing them. Research on children's spontaneous singing has shown that children are inherently musical and freely initiate vocal play and improvised songs. In using a largely untapped source of parents’ own perspective on singing lullabies - in relation to their own and children’s sense of meaningfulness, companionship and wellbeing - this project offers an input to the benefits of musical parenting. Allowing the lullaby-event to come to the surface in its authentic, contemporary and genuine setting, the stories add nuance to our understanding of how parents and children relate to one another today. However, the Scandinavian “culte of independence”, where parents seem to expect and push their children’s towards a very early independence, is partly confirmed. A reawakening of the parents’ own musicality occurs in the meeting with their children at bedtime. The new concept of musical mindfulness is used and seems to fit to parents’ experiences of the lullaby-act as it encourages a present, open, non-judgemental and relaxed state of mind. It also gives an important insight into the parents’ experiences and values regarding their use of their own musical and creative resources. This study explores the meanings of singing lullabies in parenting and their significance in parent-child interaction. Despite the vast research by psychologists and sociologists on parent-child interaction, little is known about the parental perspective of singing lullabies. Lisa Bonnár’s study furnishes opportunies of understanding Norwegian parents’ lullaby singing, a social and musical phenomen that has been hidden, until now, within the confines of private homes.
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