Resilience, music therapy, and human adaptation: nurturing young children and families

Abstract

The purpose of this theoretical paper is to examine current literature in developmental psychology in order to discuss how music therapy can foster resilience in early childhood. Resilience is the ability to cope with stress and adversity. I review behavioral, psychosocial, and neurobiological processes of resilience from a systems thinking perspective, emphasizing the importance of socio-cultural experiences. In addition, I explore how music therapy can function as an asset-building, mediating, or risk-activated intervention, thus establishing a theoretical basis justifying music's therapeutic role in human adaptation processes. Moreover, I argue that music therapists must understand the processes involved in resilience and positive human adaptation in order to design proactive clinical approaches to (a) prepare young children and their families for handling adversity, (b) increase parental sensitivity, and (c) create multiple opportunities for families to develop adaptive interpersonal interaction patterns.

Keywords:

• resilience
• early childhood
• prevention
• family
• systems theory

Acknowledgment

The author would like to acknowledge the help of faculty and doctoral students at Michigan State in commenting on an early draft of this paper and thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism.

Notes

¹For example, two references in the literature explore the role of music therapy in developing mother–child attachment (see Bargiel, 2004; d l'Etoile, 2006); to the best of this author's knowledge, no published follow-up research exists. A recent study (d'lEtoile, in press) explored acoustic parameters of infant-directed singing in mothers who have symptoms of depression indicating their singing may not effectively promote infant regulation.

²In some referenced quantitative studies researchers compared participant responses under different conditions. The experimental condition, however, involved engaging children in a music-based application over a series of treatment sessions or discrete trials (thus constituting clinical work with indirect benefits for the participants). In the referenced qualitative studies, the researcher held a dual role of therapist-researcher or had access to videotapes of music therapy sessions.