The effects of music and movement on mother–infant interactions

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the effects of a music and movement (M&M) programme on healthy first-time mothers and their 2–6-month-old infants over a five-week period. Experiment 1 (N = 96) examined the effects of the M&M activities and the face-to-face (F2F) social contact of a group instruction method on the perception of mothers' interactions with their infants and maternal postnatal attachment. Generally, M&M increased mothers' interactions with their infants specific to music-type activities and mothers' attachment to their infants. Contrary results occurred for No M&M-control group mothers. The presence/absence of F2F had no effect. Experiment 2 (N = 44) focused on behavioural effects of M&M on mothers' infant-directed speech (IDS) and mother–infant reciprocity. M&M increased dyadic reciprocity, and increased the duration, mean pitch and pitch range of mothers' IDS. Without M&M a decrease in attentional characteristics of mothers' IDS and dyadic reciprocity occurred.

Keywords:

• mother–infant interactions
• music
• movement
• social contact
• infant-directed speech
• dyadic reciprocity

Acknowledgements

We thank Amanda Reid for assistance with manuscript editing and preparation.

Notes on contributors

Wendy Vlismas has worked as an early years education and parenting adviser for more than 25 years. She now combines her years of experience and research to assist and support the challenges of first-time parents, particularly the enhancement of parent–infant interactions and well-being using music and movement. As part of this support, she is the creator of the Bond With Baby online programme. For correspondence email: [email protected]

Stephen Malloch's primary research interest is the model of interaction known as Communicative Musicality, co-developed with Professor Colwyn Trevarthen. He is currently based at the University of Sydney investigating the musicality of speech between psychotherapists and their patients in the treatment of complex traumatic disorders. He is also in private practice as a counsellor, coach and workshop facilitator.

Denis Burnham is the Director of MARCS Institute and Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Sydney. He has specific expertise in infant speech perception, speech perception and language development, analysis of special speech registers, studies of tone perception and production, and auditory–visual speech perception and production. He has extensive experience in leading large collaborative inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional research projects.

Notes

In keeping with findings on the reciprocal nature of caregiver–infant interactions, we regard the term IDS as not entirely accurate, as it does not acknowledge the cooperative and shared nature of the interaction. A better term might be infant-inclusive speech; however, in this paper we will use the generally accepted term.