Singing to Babies Improves Their Moods

Singing to your infant can significantly boost the baby’s mood, according to a recent Yale study published May 28 in Child Development.

Around the world and across cultures, singing to babies seems to come instinctively to caregivers. Now, new findings support that singing is an easy, safe, and free way to help improve the mental well-being of infants. Because improved mood in infancy is associated with a greater quality of life for both parents and babies, this in turn has benefits for the health of the entire family, the researchers say. The study also helps explain why musical behaviors may have evolved in parents.

“Singing is something that anyone can do, and most families are already doing,” says Eun Cho, DMA, postdoctoral researcher at the Yale Child Study Center, and co-first author of the study. “We show that this simple practice can lead to real health benefits for babies.”

“We don’t always need to be focusing on expensive, complicated interventions when there are others that are just as effective and easy to adopt,” adds Lidya Yurdum, a PhD student in psychology at the University of Amsterdam, affiliated with the Child Study Center, and co-first author.

The new study included 110 parents and their babies, most of whom were under the age of 4 months. The researchers randomly assigned the parents into two groups, encouraging one group to sing to their infants more frequently by teaching the parents new songs, providing karaoke-style instructional videos and infant-friendly songbooks, and sending weekly newsletters offering ideas for incorporating music into daily routines.

For four weeks, these parents received surveys on their smartphones at random times throughout the day. Parents answered questions related to infant mood, fussiness, time spent soothing, caregiver mood, and frequency of musical behavior. For instance, parents were asked to rate how positive or negative their baby’s mood was within the last two to three hours before receiving the survey. The 56 parents in the control group also received an identical intervention in the four weeks following the initial experiment.

The researchers found that parents were successfully able to increase the amount of time they spent singing to their babies. “When you ask parents to sing more and provide them with very basic tools to help them in that journey, it’s something that comes very naturally to them,” says Yurdum.

Not only did the parents sing more frequently, but they also chose to use music especially in one context in particular: calming their infants when they were fussy. "We didn't say to parents, 'We think you should sing to your baby when she's fussy,' but that's what they did," says Samuel Mehr, EdD, an adjunct associate professor at the Child Study Center, and director of The Music Lab. Mehr is also the study’s principal investigator. "Parents intuitively gravitate toward music as a tool for managing infants' emotions, because they quickly learn how effective singing is at calming a fussy baby."

Most surprisingly, the responses to the survey showed that increased singing led to a measurable improvement in infants’ moods overall, compared to those in the control group—in other words, parents who sang more rated their babies’ moods as significantly higher. Importantly, improved mood was found in general, not just as an immediate response to music.

While singing did not significantly impact caregivers’ moods in this study, Mehr believes that there could be follow-on effects on health in young families. "Every parent knows that the mood of an infant affects everyone around that infant," says Mehr. "If improvements to infant mood persist over time, they may well generalize to other health outcomes."

The team believes that the benefits of singing may be even stronger than the current study shows. “Even before our intervention, these participating families were particularly musical,” Yurdum explains. “Despite that, and despite only four weeks of the intervention, we saw benefits. That suggests that the strength of singing to your babies would likely be even stronger in a family that does not already rely on music as a way of soothing their infants.”

The Child Study Center researchers are currently enrolling parents and babies under 4 months old in a follow-up study, “Together We Grow,” which will investigate the impact of infant-directed singing over an eight-month period.

Although the researchers did not see an improvement in caregiver mood within four weeks, they are intrigued to see if singing can help alleviate stress or conditions such as postpartum depression in the long term. They are also interested in exploring whether singing might have benefits beyond mood in infants, such as improved sleep.

Previous work from The Music Lab has shown that infant-directed music is universal in humans, and that humans can even infer context of songs—such as whether it is for dancing or a lullaby—in foreign languages and from other cultures. For Mehr, the new findings make sense in light of these basic science results. "Our understanding of the evolutionary functions of music points to a role of music in communication," says Mehr. "Parents send babies a clear signal in their lullabies: I'm close by, I hear you, I'm looking out for you—so things can't be all that bad."

The babies, apparently, are listening.

This research was supported by grants from the United States National Institutes of Health (awards DP5OD024566 and R21HD113998) and Yale University. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Support was also provided by the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Aparangi and the University of Auckland.