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In celebration of what would have been Anna Freud’s 119th birthday, we have put together a timeline of important events, her influences and her most celebrated publications. From her education and love of learning, to her role as a teacher, children and child psychoanalysis always played a large part in the life of Anna Freud. Her strong relationship with her father only added to her interest in psychoanalysis, and her research is still held in extremely high regard today. You can check out the timeline of her life below or learn more about Anna Freud’s life via the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

If you think we’ve missed a key part of Anna Freud’s life, we’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.

Headline image credit: Rorschach inkblot test, by Hermann Rorschach. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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By Siu-Lan Tan

It’s spring and about this time each year, a little ritual takes place. After the winter melt, many children encounter their first puddle with the zeal of an explorer discovering a new land.

Indeed, a puddle of water is a microcosm. In it, you find bits of sky, some leaves and a little froth, your own reflection. It is shallow and deep. It records your every step, augments your every move, but eventually leaves no trace that you were ever there. It is both moving and still. A mysterious thing is a puddle, and worth investigating.

After watching hours of YouTube videos of infants and toddlers stomping puddles of different sizes and shapes, I have come up with my list of “Eight Favorite Videos of Kids Discovering Puddles”—and will comment on them briefly as a developmental (child) psychologist. Take a moment to slow down and enjoy this mesmerizing medley, my ode to Spring!

#8   Boy meets first puddle

This toddler does a double-take when he first sees a puddle that has suddenly appeared in the front yard. What is that? He puts his toe in it, gasps, and takes a step back. His mother labels the experience (“Water. Puddle”), encouraging further exploration. He falls into the puddle, and gets back up again. It’s all of life in short review.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#7   Puddle splashing in Cape Breton

Ben, well-equipped in rain-gear, epitomizes Piaget’s portrait of the child as mini-scientist. Discovering a puddle for the first time, he performs repeated “tests” on this new watery universe—just like a scientist would, trying many new things to see the different effects. Piaget referred to these as circular reactions: actions repeated over and over again by the infant because the interesting effects compel the infant to try it again. Through these ‘circular reactions’, he repeatedly explores the shallow borders, touches the water with bare hands, wades into the deep middle, and examines the effects of moving in different pathways and stamping with alternating feet, on the responses of the water. His babbles punctuate his discoveries.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#6   Athena splashing in puddles—Spring 2014

Athena finds a puddle and exclaims “I’ve never seen it before!”. Piaget referred to our earliest kind of intelligence as “sensorimotor” as an infant uses her senses and motor actions to explore, and build a storehouse of knowledge about the physical world. Athena coordinates sight, touch, hearing, and action to examine the new puddle. We witness circular reactions again, this time with very fine variations. She intentionally alters the angle and speed of her foot taps, and is engrossed in observing the effects on the water—the contingencies of her actions, just like a scientist immersed in an experiment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#5   Charlie discovers puddles 

Charlie’s mother gives him time to explore on his own, and then responds to what has seized his interest. Developmental psychologists call this a joint attention episode, as child and parent are focused on the same thing. This’ joint attention episode’ is a natural teaching moment for acquiring new knowledge about the world, as well as developing language and expanding vocabulary—as the child learns all about the shared object of attention from his mother’s running commentary. “You’re in a puddle. Charlie, what does it feel like? Is it hot or cold? Is it wet or dry?”. (Charlie learns about properties of things, and new words, by direct experience). ”Do you see all the ripples you’re making? Just like the rain”. (The focus is now on cause and effect, perhaps a new word ‘ripple’). This is a master class in progress.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#4   Freya’s first puddle

Freya stops stomping puddles intermittently to look up and giggle with pure delight. While adults often dichotomize emotion and intellect, and researchers have focused mainly on the negative effects of emotion on learning, studies are beginning to suggest a link between positive emotions, such as joy and hope, and academic success (see, for example, Reinhard Pekrun). Freya’s gleeful responses show the natural joy that comes with learning, the exhilaration of discovering something new about the world around us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#3   What if you encounter a mud puddle…when you’re driving your John Deere tractor?

This is an opportunity for Karsen to develop his cognitive skills—problem-solving—with a little advice from his father. Rather than running up to help and rescue the boy, dad instructs him on what to do from a distance. More than just the purely cognitive aspects of problem-solving, Karsen gains a sense of self-efficacy which may boost his ability on future tasks.

Click here to view the embedded video.

#2   Little girl in pink snowsuit discovers ice for the first time

This video has gone viral with almost one million views of the original post. The toddler finds a puddle that has frozen, and experiences ice for the first time. She’s somewhat younger than the other infants, and as she explores the ice patch with her feet and hands, she is constrained by her puffy snowsuit and proportions of her body. At this age, her head is one-fourth of her height (it is 1/8 in the typical adult) and her limbs are still relatively short. The consequences are worth seeing twice.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And the #1 video is…   A Kid, a Dog, and a Puddle.

For this one, please read the commentary after watching.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This remarkable video has gone viral and is approaching eight million views. Okay, perhaps it’s not his first puddle but small bodies of water have not lost their luster for this boy. What’s most striking is the uncanny coordination between the boy (Arthur) and his dog (Watson), a sort of interactional synchrony (a matching of emotion and behavior, which allows for a ‘dialogue’ to take place through action). Arthur does not drop the leash carelessly but places it down gently, looking back at Watson twice—and the dog returns his gaze. The dog seems to sense the boy’s intentions and waits patiently for his companion. Arthur is immersed in sensorimotor activity through circular reactions, repeatedly running through the puddle. But he keeps his loyal dog in mind, and reunites quickly with his pal to continue their journey in step together.

As I sifted through scores of videos of infants and children stomping and splashing in puddles, I was reminded that play is a child’s work. The foundations of everything a child needs to learn across the domains—cognitive, emotional, and social—are learned through play.

This is so beautifully illustrated in a moment of curiosity, discovery, and joy of a child, evoked by a small pool of water left after the rain.

Siu-Lan Tan is Associate Professor of Psychology at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, USA. She is primary editor of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia (Oxford University Press 2013), the first book consolidating the research on the role of music in film, television, video games, and computers. A version of this article also appears on Psychology Today. Siu-Lan Tan also has her own blog, What Shapes Film? Read her previous blog posts.

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Image Credit: Jack in Puddle Photo by Robert Murphy. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Robert Murphy Flickr.

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By Siu-Lan Tan

Sometimes you think you can explain something, and then it turns out you really can’t. This remarkable video was posted last year but only went viral in the US in the last few weeks, approaching 5 million hits in a short time. When I first saw it, I was immediately enchanted.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dubbed by the press as ‘the Mini Maestro’ (although to be correct, she would be a maestra), the video shows little Lara Glozou with a church choir in Kyrgyzstan. She’s the young daughter of one of the choir members and often attends rehearsal.

After watching a few times, I thought I knew what might be happening. This must be an observant child who’s mirroring the actions of a conductor standing in front of the choir, interspersed with a little improvisation of her own. I thought she was a remarkable imitator, not just able to capture the conductor’s motions, but also the emotions.

But then I found another video. It shows the choir rehearsing the same song from another angle, allowing us to see the conductor’s motions of the right hand while Lara is gesturing expressively in the far right corner by the piano.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was amazed to see that the conductor is not making the same kinds of motions as Lara after all. Even though the conductor’s gestures may be outlining the regularity of the beat and phrasing, many of Lara’s gestures and body movements—the forward lean, the hand to the chest, the sway of the body, and the dips and turns of the head—seem to be her own.

To be fair, Lara is not really “conducting.” If she were directing, her motions would come slightly before the events in the music, in anticipation of them in order to cue the choir. Her movements are more like an expression of the music. However, as an expression or sensitive interpretation of the music, I find her gestures to be remarkable. Truly extraordinary. For instance, her gestures are fewer and more prolonged during the female solo up to 0:21 (on the first video). They are a series of poses. But at 0:22 when the choir comes in, she immediately shifts to grand sweeping gestures. The variety of shapes that she forms with her hands alone express a rainbow of emotions and tone colors.

I am in awe of this little girl’s ability not only to reflect peaks and valleys in the melody of the music, and momentum of the phrases, but also the shape of the sound. For the last note of the song, she curves her left and right hands into the widest arcs for a broad final tone — a lion’s roar — rather than the kind of ending that gradually fades away.

This small child has had so little time on earth to experience falling in love, the sting of heartbreak, betrayal, triumph, grief, pain, and the rest of the great emotional topography of life. How is she able to convey the semblance of emotional depth and angst? Where is she getting her musical sensitivity? Do some young children just have an old soul?

As a former music major, I took Conducting 101. My spine was rigid, my gestures were tiny and angular. As a music student in my 20s, I had none of the intensity and theatrical weight of this little girl. More recently, I have written about how infants begin to spontaneously respond to music in bodily ways, nodding their heads and waving arms to rhythmic music once they are able to sit freely at about six months. Later, bobbing up and down with knee-bends, and spinning around in circles to music between one and two years, after they become mobile.

However, they do so for only short bursts, and most of the movements of two- and three-year-old children don’t really match the music in time (Moog, 1976; Malbrán, 2000). Although Lara is not always synchronized with the music, her deep expressive gestures capture the musical events in a broad way, even anticipating some musical moments, as she is familiar with this piece.

Little is known about young children’s interpretation of music. In one of the few studies in this area, Boone & Cunningham (2001) showed that four-year-olds can move a flexible teddy bear in dance-like fashion, to express emotion in music through movement. However the musical emotions they recognized and expressed were basic emotions (such as happiness, or sadness, or anger). What we seem to observe in Lara is much more nuanced. How is she able to capture this depth in music?

I spoke with a grown-up maestro that I greatly admire, Andrew Koehler, Music Director of the Kalamazoo Philharmonia. He said, “It’s really astonishing. Lara moves in a way that shows that she recognizes agogic accents“ (longer durations of tones, which give natural stress to music). She often reflects this with larger, more expansive motions of her arms that mark those accents.

Her gestures also capture finer details. At 0:45 to 0:47 in the first video, Koehler points out how a higher tone of greater tension resolves to a lower tone of lower tension. The toddler reflects this: “Lara leans into the music, her right hand pushing into it with a claw-like motion [capturing high tone and high tension in the music]. Then both left and right arms make downward motions as her posture goes back to an upright position again [lower tone, lower tension].”

And then there’s Jonathan Okseniuk. Here he is at three years old, appearing to ‘conduct’ a recording of the last movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in his home in Mesa, Arizona.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Even if he appears to be getting some coaxing off camera, this is a remarkable three-year-old.

Here is Jonathan again at age four, conducting a live orchestra in a rousing rendition of Khachaturian’s ‘Sabre Dance’. “This is a more challenging arena,” explains Koehler, “which would require Jonathan to anticipate what will happen in the music as opposed to simply responding to it.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are many other videos of Jonathan on the web, conducting Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and Strauss with different orchestras.

How an understanding of music blooms so early in some young ones astonishes me. This mini-maestra’s sensitive expression of music and mini-maestro’s early conducting chops have left me perplexed.

Siu-Lan Tan is Associate Professor of Psychology at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, USA. She is primary editor of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia (Oxford University Press 2013), the first book consolidating the research on the role of music in film, television, video games, and computers. A version of this article also appears on Psychology Today. Siu-Lan Tan also has her own blog, What Shapes Film? Read her previous blog posts.

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By Karen Schiltz, Ph.D.

“My child could be the next mass murderer. Alex has bipolar disorder. Last year, he pulled a phone off of the wall in the classroom and threw it at the teacher. They evacuated the whole class and my son was suspended for one day. He was suspended five times in nursery school for hitting children. Alex screams at home, swears, throws his toys against the wall, has hit his sister more times that I can tell, and can’t pay attention for the life of him now. He does not like the word ‘no.’ Alex is eight and in second grade. I’m afraid and something has to be done. I’m glad we are dealing with this now. I have to face this.”

I saw the parents of Alex Monday morning.

Like many of you, I was in shock and horrified about the slaughtering of 20 little children and 6 adults. I wondered: why did Adam Lanza not receive help for his condition or, if he did, was he misdiagnosed? Did his parents not follow through with providers? Did providers fail to address his problems? Were the parents in denial? Were teachers in denial?

“I’m scared. I see things at night like shadows and I hear soldiers that are coming to get me at night. I ran into daddy and mommy’s room. I saw something black when I was running to my mommy’s room. Someone is whispering to me too. I hear whispers and voices. I don’t understand what they are saying.”

Alex was eager to tell me about the voices and sounds he heard. He also told me that his parents were oftentimes angry at home and he was always scared of what could happen next.

His parents told me about several warning signs that increased in severity, intensity, and frequency as Alex aged. They were:

• Fears of attending school
• Hearing sounds such as whispers and soldiers conversing with each other
• Nightmares
• Poor frustration tolerance
• Problems managing his anger
• Real shifts in mood ranging from deep sadness to silliness
• Trouble concentrating
• Trouble sleeping
• Withdrawal from family and friends
• Wringing of hands and complaints of stomachaches

Do these parents need counseling? Does Alex need help as well? Will the parents accept my feedback after I assessed their child, interviewed Alex’s teachers and them, and conducted the testing?

Monday had a happy ending. These parents were not in denial nor did they deny Alex had a problem. They realized early intervention was crucial to helping their child. Alex’s parents were aware that their son’s marked troubles with managing his anger, low frustration tolerance, problems with focusing, and his ability to “go from 0 to 100” in a split second of rage were not normal. They deeply wanted a typical eight-year-old boy before it was too late.

It is not too late for lots of children. All of us, including teachers, physicians, and other care-taking and healthcare professionals need to listen to and observe children when something is not quite right. Taking the time to talk with children and educate parents about the warning signs of mental illness is critical.

Assessment and early intervention are the keys to unlocking the cause of a child’s pain and other problems such as a reading disorder. We can help children if we intervene at an early age and recognize the signs of mental illness such as mood instability, sadness, irritability, and anxiety. Many children need help and aren’t getting it. Recognizing a child’s struggles as early as possible is key to optimizing their success in life and overall mental health. The tragedy can be when it is not addressed in time to help either the victim or aggressor.

The bottom line is: we need to review the big picture of what is happening with our children and help parents advocate for their child when something is a little off. It was not too late for Alex and it shouldn’t be for your child either.

Karen Schiltz is the co-author of Beyond The Label: A Guide to Unlocking a Child’s Educational Potential and Associate Clinical Professor (volunteer) at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has over 26 years of experience assessing children and young adults with developmental, medical, and emotional disorders including the autistic spectrum and maintains a private practice specializing in neuropsychology in Calabasas, California. Dr. Schiltz blogs for Psychology Today at Beyond the Label.

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By Adam Ockelford

I spend around 12 hours a week – every week – sharing thoughts, feelings, new ideas, reminiscences and even jokes with some very special children who have extraordinary musical talents, and many of whom are severely autistic. I’m Professor of Music at the University of Roehampton, and the children come to see me in a large practice room in Southlands College where there are two pianos, so we don’t have to scrap over personal space. My pupils usually indicate what piece they would like us to play together, and they tell me when they’ve had enough. Sometimes, they tease me by seeming to suggest one thing when they mean another. We share many jokes and the occasional sad moment too.

But the children rarely say a word. They communicate everything through their playing. For them, music is a proxy language.

On Sunday mornings, at 10.00 a.m., I steel myself for Romy’s arrival. I know that the next two hours will be an exacting test of my musical mettle. Yet Romy, aged 11, has severe learning difficulties, and she doesn’t speak at all. She is musical to the core, though: she lives and breathes music – it is the very essence of her being. With her passion comes a high degree of particularity: Romy knows precisely which piece she wants me to play, at what tempo and in which key. And woe betide me if I get it wrong.

When we started working together, four years ago, mistakes and misunderstandings occurred all too frequently, since (as it turned out), there were very few pieces that Romy would tolerate: the theme from Für Elise (never the middle section), for example, the Habanera from Carmen, and some snippets from ‘Buckaroo Holiday’ (the first movement of Aaron Copland’s Rodeo). Romy’s acute neophobia meant that even one note of a different piece would evoke shrieks of fear-cum-anger, and the session could easily grow into an emotional conflagration.

So gradually, gradually, over weeks, then months, and then years, I introduced new pieces – sometimes, quite literally, at the rate of one note per session. On occasion, if things were difficult, I would even take a step back before trying to move on again the next time. And, imperceptibly at first, Romy’s fears started to melt away. The theme from Brahms’s Haydn Variations became something of an obsession, followed by the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata. Then it was Joplin’s The Entertainer, and Rocking All Over the World by Status Quo.

Over the four years, Romy’s jigsaw box of musical pieces – fragments ranging from just a few seconds to a minute or so in length – has filled up at an ever-increasing rate. Now it’s overflowing, and it’s difficult to keep up with Romy’s mercurial musical mind: mixing and matching ideas in our improvised sessions, and even changing melodies and harmonies so they mesh together, or to ensure that my contributions don’t!

As we play, new pictures in sound emerge and then retreat as a kaleidoscope of ideas whirls between us. Sometimes a single melody persists for 15 minutes, even half an hour. For Romy, no matter how often it is repeated, a fragment of music seems to stay fresh and vibrant. At other times, it sounds as though she is trying to play several pieces at the same time – she just can’t get them out quickly enough, and a veritable nest of earworms wriggle their way onto the piano keyboard. Vainly I attempt to herd them into a common direction of musical travel.

So here I am, sitting at the piano in Roehampton, on a Sunday morning in mid-November, waiting for Romy to join me (not to be there when she arrives is asking for trouble). I’m limbering up with a rather sedate rendition of the opening of Chopin’s Etude in C major, Op. 10, No. 1, when I hear her coming down the corridor, vocalising with increasing fervour. I feel the tension rising, and as her father pushes open the door, she breaks away from him, rushes over to the piano and, with a shriek and an extraordinarily agile sweep of her arm, elbows my right hand out of the way at the precise moment that I was going to hit the D an octave above middle C. She usurps this note to her own ends, ushering in her favourite Brahms-Haydn theme. Instantly, Romy smiles, relaxes and gives me the choice of moving out of the way or having my lap appropriated as an unwilling cushion on the piano stool. I choose the former, sliding to my left onto a chair that I’d placed earlier in readiness for the move that I knew I would have to make.

I join in the Brahms, and encourage her to use her left hand to add a bass line. She tolerates this up to the end of the first section of the theme, but in her mind she’s already moved on, and without a break in the sound, Romy steps onto the set of A Little Night Music, gently noodling around the introduction to Send in the Clowns. But it’s in the wrong key – G instead of E flat – which I know from experience means that she doesn’t really want us to go into the Sondheim classic, but instead wants me to play the first four bars (and only the first four bars) of Schumann’s Kleine Studie Op. 68, No. 14. Trying to perform the fifth bar would in any case be futile since Romy’s already started to play … now, is it I am Sailing or O Freedom. The opening ascent from D through E to G could signal either of those possibilities. Almost tentatively, Romy presses those three notes down and then looks at me and smiles, waiting, and knowing that whichever option I choose will be the wrong one. I just shake my head at her and plump for O Freedom, but sure enough Rod Stewart shoves the Spiritual out of the way before it has time to draw a second breath.

From there, Romy shifts up a gear to the Canon in D ­– or is it really Pachelbel’s masterpiece? With a deft flick of her little finger up to a high A, she seems to suggest that she wants Streets of London instead (which uses the same harmonies). I opt for Ralph McTell, but another flick, this time aimed partly at me as well as the keys, shows that Romy actually wants Beethoven’s Pathetique theme – but again, in the wrong key (D). Obediently I start to play, but Romy takes us almost immediately to A flat (the tonality that Beethoven originally intended). As soon as I’m there, though, Romy races back up the keyboard again, returning to Pachelbel’s domain. Before I’ve had time to catch up, though, she’s transformed the music once more; now we’re hearing the famous theme from Dvorak’s New World Symphony.

I pause to recover my thoughts, but Romy is impatiently waiting for me to begin the accompaniment. Two or three minutes into the session, and we’ve already touched on 12 pieces spanning 300 years of Western music and an emotional range to match.

Yet here is a girl who in everyday life is supposed to have no ‘theory of mind’ ­– the capacity to put yourself in other people’s shoes and think what they are thinking. Here is someone who is supposed to lack the ability to communicate. Here is someone who functions, apparently, at an 18-month level.

But I say here is a joyous musician who amazes all who hear her. Here is a girl in whom extreme ability and disability coexist in the most extraordinary way. Here is someone who can reach out through music and touch one’s emotions in a profound way.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I explore the science of how Romy and her peers are able to do what they do in my new book Applied Musicology, which uses a theory of how music makes sense to all of us to explore intentionality and influence in children who use little or no language. If music is important to us all, it is truly the lifeblood of many children with autism. Essential brain food.

Adam Ockelford is Professor of Music and Director of the Applied Music Research Centre at the University of Roehampton in London. He is the author of Applied Musicology: Using Zygonic Theory to Inform Music Education, Therapy, and Psychology Research (OUP, 2012).

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The post Music: a proxy language for autistic children appeared first on OUPblog.

Reading – we all recognise it as a core skill. By ‘intelligent reading’, I mean reading with a level of comprehension commensurate with the child’s experience of the world they inhabit. Fortunately, reading to children is now encouraged  as being supportive of  reading literacy and as a sound foundation for future learning.

Not that long ago, children were seen as passive recipients of the eager parent’s input via the quality time spent in ‘read to me’ and ‘bedtime story’ sessions.

I always felt sure my children were taking in much more than the professional opinion allowed.

Recently, I borrowed a copy of Dr. Virginia Lowe’s very excellent book, “Stories, Pictures and Reality: Two children tell” (Routlege 2007) based on the record of her own two children’s responses to books from birth to adolescence. Dr. Lowe’s book vindicates what I felt all along as a parent! This book should be set reading for students of primary, early childhood and remedial teaching, child and family psychology and for anyone with an interest in literacy!

Her children had a smorgasbord of stories proffered continuously, both Dr Lowe and her husband being librarians who were passionate advocates of children’s literature.  The children’s reactions to and responses concerning elements of story and  illustrations provide a wonderfully insightful peek into the psyche of the child. Both Lowe children clearly had a blessed and privileged childhood, but being ‘read to’ is within the reach of most children. Public libraries and school libraries are accessible to most families. Even if parental work commitments make  a nightly ‘reading’ impossible, there are weekends and visits to grandparents when  a ‘storytelling’ session can be included in the agenda.

There are other options.

Storytelling sessions are held regularly in many public libraries and are ‘free’.

And online  resources such as “Ripple Reader” and “A Story Before Bed” provide a way for even absent grandparents and parents to read to their children. In the USA and Israel, ‘bedtime stories’ are part of official early education policy. Programmes like “Reach Out and Read” and “Read to Me” do a monumental job in promoting literacy and the power of  storytime to be a deeply meaningful and bonding time in families.

By Professor Jane Edwards

What does the baby have to learn in these first 12-18 months (before they can speak)? The list  includes what you do with your eyes when with another, how long to hold a mutual gaze, what turn-off head movements work, and with whom, how close you should let the other come to you… how to read body positions… how to enter into turn taking when vocalizing with another… how to joke around, negotiate escalate, back off… make friends, and so on.
Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality (OUP, 2010) p. 110-111

As a music therapy scholar, teacher, and practitioner for more than 20 years, I have been able to learn from many sources about the crucial role our early years play in our lives. The ability to reflect on challenges experienced in our adult lives by linking back to childhood experiences is an essential aspect of the way that many music therapists practice. Rather than using descriptions of family histories to apportion blame, the therapist tries to understand the current experience of the patient and their worldview through the lens of past experience, to see if there is some way to make sense of self-destructive behaviours, or difficulties experienced in creating meaningful and satisfying relationships with others.

I began my early music therapy practice in mental health services and in nursing homes, working with people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease or other types of dementia. Many people, whether in group or individual music therapy programmes, offered reflections on their early life, and described aspects of their parents’ availability or unavailability; referring to the quality of these first relationships in ways that helped me to understand something of what might have been unresolved or unsatisfying for them. Eventually I found myself very keen to work with people much earlier in life to see whether music therapy could ameliorate some of the issues my older patients were facing.

Although I worked in paediatric music therapy for seven years at a children’s hospital, it was only when I was writing the first proposal to found the (now) international parent-infant support programme Sing & Grow that I had the chance to bring all of my past experience to bear: to make a case for the importance of promoting loving, playful, and nurturing interactions between parents and infants where vulnerability was in evidence. Through my work in this field, I have become increasingly aware of an unrecognised field of practice in music therapy: parent-infant work. This involves the referral of vulnerable parents to a music therapy service. Parents usually attend with their infants and the music therapist provides a safe and accepting space in which the parent and infant pair or group can be encouraged to play and interact in supportive and mutually satisfying ways. This is not always ‘music’ as it might be generally understood; rather it is a musical way of interacting that the therapist encourages.

When adults speak to infants we use particular ways of interaction that seem to be the same across the world. But we should ask why do we use such an exaggerated, playful, and musical way of speaking to infants? The obvious answer is because the infants like it — they raise their eyebrows, fix their gaze on the speaker’s face, and sometimes smile quite quickly on hearing us say ‘ooohhh whooo is my little baaaby?’ This is especially true if the speaker is a family member but it also can occur in new encounters when the conversational partner knows and can offer this communication in a playful and experimental way.  However, there are many more powerful scientific and theoretical findings that indicate how this type of interaction builds the bonds of trust and love between parents and infants.

Work by psychobiologist Colwyn Trevarthen, the ethologist Ellen Dissanayake, and researcher Sandra Trehub and her team at the University of Toronto, has paved the way in showing how the functions of this interaction have less to do with entertaining and engaging the baby and are more aligned with the infant’s ability to evoke and interpret these signals from adults and their siblings within weeks of birth. For me, and for the researchers mentioned above, these interactions are easily identified as musical. Observations of the nature of these interactions between parents and infants led Stephen Malloch to coin the term ‘Communicative Musicality’, to capture the unique pitch and rhythmic structures that communicative partners use.

This type of interaction is, as the quote from Stern at the opening attests, playful, rich, and highly involved. It teaches the many skills we need in being able to be with people successfully in intimate relationships, in relationships involving teachers and students, and in work groups. When we do not have adequately rich and supported experiences of attachment in infancy there can be lifelong consequences. Therefore, offering support to parents and infants in difficulty can provide long term benefits. Music therapy is uniquely poised to make a useful contribution to this work as infants are receptive to musical and music-like interactions from sensitive and responsive adults.

Professor Jane Edwards is an Associate Professor at the University of Limerick where she directs the Music & Health Research Group and is co-ordinator of the MA in Music Therapy in the Irish World Academy of Music & Dance. She was formerly a guest professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin (2004-2011). She is President of the International Association for Music & Medicine. She has published extensively in the field of music therapy including Music Therapy and Parent-Infant Bonding (OUP, 2011), and is sole editor for the first Oxford Handbook of Music Therapy (forthcoming).

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Image credit: ‘Mother Kissing Baby’ By Vera Kratochvil (public domain via Wikimedia Commons).

5 Stars

Song for Papa Crow

Marit Menzin

Schiffer Publishing

No. Pages: 32      Ages: 4 to 8
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From  inside jacket:  Little Crow loves to sing, and Papa Crow loves his song. But when Little Crow shares his crow songs with the other birds at the big old tree, they laugh and scatter. Maybe the Amazing Mockingbird can teach him to sing songs with the finches, flycatchers, and cardinals—and help him make some friends. But Little Crow should be careful what he wishes for . . .

Using Mockingbird’s tip, Little Crow becomes the most popular bird on the block. But, in a moment of danger, he learns that singing someone else’s song can have terrible consequences and that his own voice—and his father’s love—is of the greatest value.

Little Crow so desperately wants a friend he will do most anything to get one, even if that means fitting in to the point of losing his own identity. When he begins to sing like the other birds, he is welcomed, becomes part of the group. What Little Crow does not realize is the cost one incurs when making a major change to fit in with the crowd.

For Little Crow, singing the other bird’s songs to fit in and have friends could cost him his life when a hawk appears overhead. Little Crow is in danger and sings out, Papa Crow does not understand it is his son singing out—he no longer recognizes Little Crow’s singing.

Little Crow said, “Per-CHIC-o-ree!”—Heelllllp!

“Poor Finch,” said Papa Crow.

Little Crow sings out, “Fee-beeee!”—Help me!

“Poor Phoebe Flycatcher!” said Papa Crow.

Like Little Crow, kids do not like being different, they want to fit in with the crowd and be accepted. Those that do not dress as the others dress, speak as the others speak, or act as the other act are often shunned and ridiculed by those that do meld into one. But the group looks, speech, and actions often do not have room for individuality, originality, or creativity. That can be hard for a kid to understand when all they want to do is fit in, have friends, and not be teased.

Little Crow had lost his identity.  His Papa no longer connected Little Crow’s singing to Little Crow. In a time of need, Papa Crow could not reach out. As a social worker, I love these types of books. Kids need to know it is okay to be themselves; to act, speak, dress like themselves and not anyone else. Fitting in with the crowd is not always the best idea. I have seen smart kids trade their intelligence to fit in and lose much more than they ever gained. Kids who are different for any reason will lose what may be the best part of themselves simply to fit in.

I like Song for Papa Crow because it can open up a dialogue between parent and kids. The story can help kids understand that fitting in may not always be the best thing to do.

The illustrations, also created by the author, are beautiful collages. There are many birds, depicted in their wonderfully layered shades of color, on every page. On Papa Crow’s head, the feathers are short and look soft. The feathers making up his tail are long and smooth. You can see the strength in the hawk and the sudden fear in Little Crow.

In addition to a good story about preserving one’s identity, there is a short primer on North American birds. I really like this book.  Song for Papa Crow is a beautiful book, with thick pages for the younger kids, interesting bird facts, and a good story that can teach kids to stay true to themselves.

Teachers, school social workers, and others who regularly work with kids will find this book immensely helpful. Parents can use the story to open a dialogue about fitting in and being true to one’s self. Kids will like the illustrations of the birds and can use the book as a guide to the birds in their neighborhood.

Song for Papa Crow is a good story for any time or reason. For collectors, the illustrations are beautiful and this is the first complete book by now author and illustrator Marit Menzin.

Song for Papa Crow

Author/Illustrator: Marit Menzin    website   
Publisher: Schiffer Publishing    website
Release Date: July 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7643-4131-1
Number of Pages: 32
Ages: 4 to 8
Grades: Pre-K to 2
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