Science has already discovered that music is one of the most powerful and complete stimuli for children's development. Children's songs are an important part of cultural tradition.
It seems as if we adults always need arguments about the usefulness of things to give value to what is valuable in itself. But given that we are immersed in such a fast-paced world and that is discarding what has always nurtured the rich world of children (games, stories, songs...), it is worth knowing what science says about the effects of singing in the little kids.
Science has already discovered that music (not so much listening to it as making it) is one of the most powerful and complex-complete stimuli for the development of children and young people (and adults!). But what about when children are too young to learn to play an instrument? The answer is simple: the voice.
Children's songs are an important part of children's cultural tradition for a reason. If all cultures have their own children's folklore, it is because it responds to a universal need, now scientifically studied in research carried out at the University of Munster (Germany) by Drs. Thomas Blank and Karl Adamek. The study was carried out in 500 kindergartens, with the collaboration of the Department of Public Health, confirming that 88% of the children who sang frequently were prepared for normal schooling, in contrast to only 44% of those whose school sang less. .
The study showed that singing and singing play stimulated the physical, mental and social development of children to an extent that has been underestimated, and that it is reflected in better brain maturation and in the development of speech, social intelligence and control of speech. The agression.
Singing benefits all children, but in a very special way those who live in situations of social disadvantage (family violence, scarce resources, recent immigration...). It is difficult to measure the countless benefits of an activity that involves the body, emotions and mind, but a possible partial explanation is provided by neurobiological and physiological studies that show that singing produces feel-good hormones and reduces those that trigger aggressive reactions. .
In the same way, it is easy to deduce that those children's songs that involve games, rounds, clapping, etc., at a certain rhythm, being more complex to execute and involving so many different skills synchronously, further enhance neural connections and the maturation of basic brain structures.
More research would be needed on the effect on young children of replacing traditional children's songs, all of them composed in the pentatonic scale (according to the Waldorf pedagogy closest to the evolutionary moment of the little ones), by songs that young people and adults listen to, all of them Composed on the heptatonic scale. Not to mention other aspects such as the lyrics, the sensory effect on very young children of many modern songs or the cultural loss that means that the richness of children's popular tradition folklore is falling into oblivion.
“Today few children would be able to sing five or six traditional Catalan or Spanish songs. We have run out of ties to the land. We do not realize that the more global life and society are, the more important it is that we remember our roots and identity.”