Kids love games, music, and dancing, amongst other activities, and sometimes getting them to sit down with you and teaching to learn something new may be a daunting experience but something that can be done with practice over time.
Research Reveals A Few Brilliant Things
According to a few different kinds of research done in various institutions, children who have been taking musical instrument lessons, especially learning how to play the piano, for a minimum of three years, had higher scores in cognitive and general tests, compared to those that had never touched a piano. Frontiers in psychology, for instance, has a lot of published works like this one.
In the curriculum department, these same children also showed a vast improvement in school subjects that involved problem-solving, such as mathematics and engineering or building things. Michigan State University also did a similar study and found that piano lessons show a reduction in anxiety and stress levels in kids and that getting your children some piano lessons or taking them to music school, had increased their levels of understanding things better, in both listening and doing.
Research done specifically at neurological institutions has disclosed that piano learning children, can easily grasp concepts in subjects such as science and physics or mathematics that are slightly more complicated, as compared to those who have never played one or learned how to play one. These same students that were tested because they had played this instrument, showed an increase of just over 30% on other tests related to the temporal lobe, which sits behind the ears, and is responsible for processing any auditory (listening) information while encoding it via the memory.
If this is not fascinating enough for you to know, then keep reading because this article dives deep into the things that doing just this one activity, has, on your children’s mind, body, and brain to name a few aspects.
What Else Is There?
Ever heard of a spelling bee competition? Well, most of us have. The intimidating competitive arrangement that schools ask their students to participate in, via standing on a stage and spelling our words that you think you know, and making it even tougher when they give you the longest most complicated words in the English vocabulary.
Did you know that if you put a kid who has had piano lessons under his belt for at least one year, next to another one who has never had the same, side by side into the spelling bee to compete, that the obvious winner would be the piano-kid? Turns out, that the reason for this is because they will remember at least 20% more words that they would have learned from the vocabulary than the other guy.
An online publication called, Science Daily published some works relating to this, which were done by the Association for Psychological Science, who looked into the effects of taking these lessons, on the working memory and has published its results online. So, there’s yet another reason why you should be taking them to music school or simply hire a private tutor to teach them in the comfort of your own home, which a lot of times is better for them.
The Piano and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder)
Not very long ago, back in 2019, there was an article published on an online news source that caught our eye. It was about a woman who had saved her son’s life, just by introducing him to the concept of music, after a long journey filled with ADHD specialists, occupational therapists, children’s psychologists, and audiology and speech therapists.
Her kid was struggling in his school in the classrooms, he was getting into trouble most of the time and he was not doing much learning either. Of course, any parent would not want this for their child and as any caring parent would, she started looking into ways to help him out that were not via anymore medical or psychological practitioners anymore.
All the while she was looking elsewhere for a solution to the kid’s ADHD problems, the answer was right under her nose. Her child found an old keyboard lying around in the throw-away, and started playing it. He was diagnosed with a respiratory condition called “Hyaline Membrane Disease”, which affects the exchange of gas in the body, i.e. it makes it impossible to happen freely as any normal system would.
As he grew older his hyperactivity would become worse, and he was constantly demanding and needed some form of stimulation to keep his mind busy and he would not sleep through the night until he was 2 years of age. When he came of age, his school readiness test revealed that he could not hold his pencil properly. Even though he was an intelligent guy with a good memory, he was diagnosed with this ADHD.
Back to when he found that old instrument. Soon after his 9th birthday he discovered this toy kids piano and began to mess around on it, listening to the songs on the radio and replaying them on the instrument. He would work this out all by himself, and soon his mother realized the talent that he had and arranged for him to take lessons.
After a few lessons, he started to excel in playing and became brilliant at his lessons and it made a huge positive impact on his school life, his behavior, his grades and his teachers saw the difference. His concentration increased, his homework started to make more sense and his understanding grew. The best part was he contradicted all the psychologists that diagnosed him in his early years, saying he would remain the same for the rest of his life. He graduated high school and went on to study music in college. Want to read the original post about this click here.
Did you know Albert Einstein, the famous physicist, also suffered from something similar until he started to play the violin, then everything changed for the better?
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