Many parents find songs and activities can help with certain everyday care tasks, particularly those which they or their babies or toddlers sometimes find a little stressful. One of the important things we do in a Music One-to-One session is to invite parents to share songs, rhymes and games they use at home to help along certain care tasks. Often parents offer little songs and games they have made up themselves from a pop song they know, or a half-remembered nursery rhyme. What matters is that the song becomes part of a routine of things parents do with their babies, which they both enjoy.
Carol sings 'The Wheels on the Bus', but makes up all kinds of words of her own for any situation: getting dressed, in the bath, at meal times. All that remains of the original song is its tune. Layla has an old Bangles pop song, which is quiet and soothing, and she always sings this to her baby when she is fractious and needs help getting to sleep.
Our aim in the sessions is also to give information and reasons why certain activities might be useful. For example, we talk about an interesting piece of research by Sandra Trehub, a music psychologist in Canada. She measured the cortisol levels of babies when they were being sung to. Cortisol is the hormone associated with stress and can be easily measured by mouth swabs.
She found that among babies, when cortisol levels were high, the levels would decrease when they were sung to; when cortisol levels were low, they would increase when they were sung to. In other words, the singing could act either way - to soothe a stressed baby, or to arouse one who is drowsy.
See www.education.ex.ac.uk/ music-one2one for more details.