This Old-Timey Parenting Trick Is The Secret To A Happier Baby, According To Research
If you're the parent of an infant, there's a good chance you're already doing it.
Wesley Tingey | Unsplash All good parents would like for their children to be happier. This is especially true when said children are babies and spend a lot of time acting decidedly unhappy.
To see what could be done to lessen the load on parents of babies, researchers examined the effects on a tried and true method for soothing. It turns out that if you sing to your baby, they will be much happier. Not only that, but it will likely have a positive impact on the parents’ mood as well.
Researchers found that babies are happier when their parents sing to them.
Singing to babies is an old-fashioned habit that parents have employed for centuries to calm upset babies. Sometimes, this may seem to settle down a fussy baby, but at others, it may seem unclear whether it has any real effect at all. New research has proven that it does, in fact, do a great deal.
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Scientists from the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and the Netherlands conducted a study on singing to babies and published their findings in the journal Child Development. To perform their study, they recruited parents from across the countries involved who were considered primary caregivers and had access to a smartphone.
According to Stephen Beech, who covered the study for Talker, “The study was conducted with 110 parents and their babies, who were on average nearly four months old.” The six-week study consisted of an intervention group and a control group.
Singing improved the mood of both babies and parents in the study.
“Parents in the intervention group completed a brief, smartphone-based music enrichment program to help them sing more often to their babies,” Beech reported. “Throughout the study, the participants completed smartphone surveys up to three times daily, reporting on both baby and parent mood, stress, sleep quality, and music use.”
Researchers found that singing affected the moods of both babies and parents. Dr. Samuel Mehr from the University of Auckland stated, “Our main finding was that the intervention successfully increased the frequency of infant-directed singing, especially in soothing contexts, and led to measurable improvements in infants’ general mood as reported by caregivers.”
Dr. Mehr described singing as “universal” and something that nearly everyone participates in regardless of culture or language. “It’s easy to do, requires no special equipment or training, and is accessible to everyone,” he noted. Dr. Mehr also said that singing to infants “may also extend to caregiver well-being,” suggesting that it’s not just babies who benefit from the practice.
Despite the study’s fascinating findings, it did have its limitations.
No study is perfect, and none can accurately represent the entire human population. However, there did seem to be some glaring issues with the sample size used for this study that researchers did not address.
Beech said that the majority of the caregivers involved in the study were located in the United States and New Zealand, two countries that are considered to be relatively prosperous compared to others. Additionally, most participants were “white, educated, and socioeconomically advantaged.”
This doesn’t exactly represent a full look at today’s children. According to the Children’s Defense Fund, three million children under the age of five lived in poverty in 2023 in the United States alone. It was the age group with the highest rate of poverty. In the future, it would be beneficial for a similar study to be conducted on a larger, more inclusive sample of families.
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There’s no telling exactly how long parents have been singing to their infants.
It’s virtually impossible to pinpoint exactly when parents began singing to babies to soothe them. In fact, the ritual is probably as old as humankind itself, with parents doing anything they could to calm their babies from the very beginning.
From classic lullabies to more modern choices, parents can truly make a difference in the lives of their babies by simply singing to them when they hold them or try to put them to sleep. It will even boost their own mood.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
