(1) Music therapy develops correct social and emotional behavior
Children usually have difficulties in acquiring correct social skills. Structured music activities, such as singing, rhythm, and integration with movement, provide an environment in which they can learn social behaviors. Group music therapy can enhance the experience of cooperation, sharing, orderliness, and proper courtesy. For example, "making friends" allows children to learn the courtesy of making friends, proper courtesy (e.g., shaking hands), and the enjoyment of musical orderliness is a powerful reinforcement for children's participation and cooperation, and can usually attract the child's attention. Incorrect behavior, such as noncompliance with order, aggressive language, and random activities, is a problem for many children. Because participation in music is a pleasurable activity for most children, those incorrect behaviors usually decrease significantly or even disappear completely. Therapists can skillfully turn various enjoyable musical activities, such as playing instruments, singing, listening, creating music, and exercising to musical accompaniment, into a reinforcing stimulus to enhance correct social behavior.
(2) Music therapy can develop children's communication skills
Low verbal communication skills are the most prominent problem in children. Mild and moderate children may develop basic language skills through music therapy, but severe and very severe children must learn non-verbal methods of communication such as sign language or the use of pictures. Musical activities are an ideal way to learn communication skills. Therapists use the melody, rhythm, tempo, pitch, intensity, and lyrics of music to develop the child's expressive language (the ability to convey verbal or nonverbal messages), receptive language (the ability to comprehend messages), and the ability to receive instruction. In addition, musical activities can help children expand their speech, improve pitch discrimination, and improve the clarity and quality of their speech.
Reception of sounds from the environment, or auditory perception, is a prerequisite for understanding language. Children usually lack the ability to distinguish meaningful auditory stimuli from irrelevant auditory stimuli in the environment, and thus are not able to acquire and communicate information. Therapists can help children enhance their auditory system by practicing a variety of musical activities, such as locating, tracking, recognizing, and differentiating sounds. Each music therapy session should include many verbal experiences, such as using repeated melodies and lyrics, or appropriate songs that emphasize certain important lyrics, to help the child enhance the effect of remembering the content. The therapist should speak as clearly as possible, use simple sentences, and give the child enough time to respond. In addition, the use of visual cues is promoted to facilitate the learning process, such as the use of fallen leaves, fruits, produce, and other items commonly found in the fall when learning a song about "fall".
(3) Music therapy can develop children's learning ability
Music activities can be used to teach concepts such as recognizing colors and shapes (classifying objects); categorizing objects by size, number, and characteristics (sequencing); learning spatial relationships between top and bottom, inside and outside; and identifying "first", "second", and "second" objects. "second" and "last" (temporal relationships). Colors can be identified by musical instruments painted in different colors, and "high and low"
can be expressed by the volume of music. Children often have difficulty with short-term memory, and their ability to recall information soon after it is presented is very limited; music can help children remember important elements of knowledge. For example, a nice and familiar melody in conjunction with learning content is an effective memory enhancement method. Presenting learning content in more than two sensory forms, i.e., multi-sensory activities, can also be effective in facilitating retention of learning content in short-term memory. For example, songs about animals are accompanied by pictures of animals. Of course, the use of music to enhance information retention requires multiple repetitions and slower speeds.
(4) Music therapy can develop children's preschool abilities
Before entering the learning stage, there are certain behaviors that must be learned, such as attention, concentration, following directions, and eye contact. Children often lack these skills, and musical activities can help them develop these pre-school behaviors. Concentration: Many children have difficulty focusing on a simple task because they lack the ability to "filter" irrelevant stimuli. Therapists use auditory, visual, tactile, and other sensory cues to help children improve concentration. For example, group music activities require children to listen to musical cues, such as playing a musical instrument when they hear music. The ability to play music at the right moment is essential for a successful musical performance.
Therapists often have to make a conscious effort to prolong the waiting time before the child can play, in order to improve their ability to focus and concentrate. Another example is following directions: for children, following simple directions is a prerequisite for learning. In order to improve the child's ability to do this, the therapy activity divides a more complex instruction process into several simple steps. First, the child learns to "stand up", and when he does this well enough, he is taught the second step: "stand up and pick up the snare drum", and the third step: "stand up and pick up the snare drum". Step 3: "Stand up, pick up the snare drum, and pass it to the child next to you." Incorporating these instructions into a song can be an effective way to help the child learn to follow successive instructions during musical activities. Another example is eye contact: the ability to initiate and maintain eye contact has a direct impact on the development of concentration and communication skills; many important messages are conveyed nonverbally, so without eye contact, these important messages will be lost.
Fun musical activities can help maintain eye contact between the therapist and the child. The duration of eye contact can be gradually extended through behavior modification methods or other methods.
(5) Music therapy can develop motor skills in children
The development of motor skills is very much related to learning. Music is by its very nature a temporal art, accomplished in a chronological sequence without any interruptions, and it is therefore an ideal tool for stimulating and training the child in movement. All human movement is related to the central nervous system, which is what arouses and controls the activity of the muscles. This highly complex system is immature at birth. Normally, the central nervous system develops rapidly in infants, and by the age of about 6 years, complex motor skills such as running and jumping can be accomplished. However, children with a slower developing central nervous system or incomplete voluntary movement may find it difficult, if not impossible. Movement to music is an important part of music therapy, and musical activities can help children develop fine and gross motor skills. The rhythmic elements of music provide structure and motivation for movement and help children learn movements such as walking, running, and jumping. In turn, these movements promote self-body awareness, balance, spatial awareness, agility, mobility, strength, orientation, and other basic learning skills. For more severely affected children, it is more important to try rhythmic movement in the beginning than to succeed in that one movement.
Once the child is more comfortable with movement, the therapist begins to encourage the child to move to the rhythm of music. Exercises for gross muscle groups, such as dancing, can help build muscle strength and help develop agility, coordination and balance. Playing a musical instrument, such as the piano or guitar, promotes fine-motor control, which in turn promotes learning skills, such as writing and drawing.
(6) Music therapy can be used as a recreational activity
The child's leisure time will be meaningless without proper training. Therapists can encourage children to engage in musical activities during their leisure time, while children learn how to use sound equipment and participate in community activities; they can learn to play musical instruments, which is also an effective way to encourage them to gain a sense of fulfillment during their leisure time. The therapist must adapt the instrument to the child's specific needs. Music as a meaningful form of leisure time activity can help children adapt better and more successfully to community life.