Singing To Your Baby Is Better Than Talking For Soothing

A crying baby can be a bit overwhelming at times and a new parent may be unsure just how to soothe him or her.

New findings published in the journal Infancy show that singing is a much better route than talking when it comes to calming a baby.

Researchers noted that humans are naturally more likely to pay attention to music. In fact, in children and adults, listening to music as a form of entertainment may result in foot-tapping, head-nodding or even drumming to the beat.

Though infants do not synchronize their external behavior with music, as they lack the requisite physical or mental ability to do so, part of the study was to "determine if they have the mental ability. Our finding shows that the babies did get carried away by the music, which suggests they do have the mental capacity to be "entrained,"" according to Professor Isabelle Peretz, of the university's Center for Research on Brain, Music and Language, in a news release.

Researchers examined a variety of measures to determine if the children's reaction to the music was not influenced by other factors, including sensitivity to their mother's voice.

When the babies were calm enough, the parents sat behind them and the experiment started. Researchers played the Turkish recordings until the babies were about to cry. While listening to the Turkish music, the babies remained calm for about nine minutes. However, when hearing baby-talk, they were calm for just about half as long at a little over four minutes, on average; for adult-directed speech, it was just under four minutes. 

During the study, researchers presented music in Turkish so that the language was unfamiliar. Yet then, the researchers tested their findings by exposing a different set of infants to recordings of mothers singing songs in a familiar language (French)--showing the same effect.

The study results are particularly important as mothers and Western mothers typically speak more to their children than sing, which may withhold some of emotion-regulating properties. The researchers believe that singing could be particularly useful for the parents who are challenged by adverse socio-economic or emotional circumstances.

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