Not “Just Playing”: Your Child’s Brain on Creative Arts

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Most kids today participate in some form of “mommy and me class” prior to a more structured school. For some parents, it’s a rite of passage to spend Saturdays snapping pictures of their child shaking a maraca or covered in finger paint! These are incredible memories shared with grandparents and friends and make great additions to both baby books and Instagram feeds.

It’s also an opportunity. The first five years form your child’s educational blueprint. Everything they learn after that will be retained and utilized or discarded and forgotten based on how their brain is developing right now. Yet every year, without fail, there is at least one parent in my class who will utter in consternation, “But they are just playing!”

This is so much more than just playing! Your toddlers’ brains are a miracle of human evolution and what they are learning in that music or art class may be the most impactful lessons of their lives. So allow me to be your personal Willie Wonka as we tour the magical chocolate factory that is your child’s mind on art and music!

Shake Baby Shake

I personally love music for music’s sake. I believe it is incredibly important for social and cultural understanding and frankly, it’s just fun! But as an educator, music is absolutely essential. Hundreds of studies have been done that tell us several things about how the human brain responds to music.

Actively interacting with music, not just listening to it but singing, dancing, and/or playing an instrument does something very unique: it lights up the entire brain at the same time. According to an ongoing study from the University of Central Florida, when you sing, dance, or play an instrument you are “improving cognitive and motor skills, spatial-temporal learning and neurogenesis.” In other words, music classes actually help your child create neurons and then allow those neurons to connect, forming neuron networks which are the building blocks for future learning. This is why interactive participation, instead of a teacher simply playing the guitar and singing to the kids, is so important. By playing and singing with us, the kids are building these neuron clusters.

But it goes even deeper than that. At a certain point, usually around age eight to 10 years, the brain does a neuron dump. It gets rid of any neurons that have not been used enough to form strong neuron networks. Different genres of music actually help a child’s brain form different neuron networks across multiple brain regions. So, by exposing children to lots of diverse complex music, we are naturally helping their mind form and strengthen so they hang on to more of these mental building blocks. That is going to help them learn, retain, and access more information later in life.

Don’t believe me? I can explain how a bill becomes a law, name all 50 states in alphabetical order, and recite the top six New York Times headlines every year from 1949-1969 but I had a hard time remembering what three things I needed at the grocery store this afternoon…why? Because School House Rock, Ray Charles, and Billy Joel don’t write anthems about my need for milk, eggs, and spinach.

The best part about all of this? You can start this learning process as early as six months old! So, crank up the classical music but make sure they are also getting reggae and Celtic and jazz and show tunes… oh, and stick a maraca or a rhythm stick in their hands!

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Now Get Messy

Ok, remember all those neurons we made in music class? They need a place to go! They need neural pathways, and art can help form those! Every time your child has a new tactile experience, like playing with playdough or finger painting, their brain forms a neural pathway. Repetition of that experience makes the pathway stronger and wider. So, if you think of a neuron like a car, the pathway is a road. The more roads you have, the more places the car can go and if more of those roads are concrete six-lane highways instead of dirt paths, your cars can move faster and more efficiently. By letting your child get messy in art you are actually allowing their mind to build a state-of-the-art information superhighway.

Art is also fantastic for fine motor skills and creative problem solving, which is another article’s worth of information. But I think my favorite thing about watching young children in art is it gives them a sense of agency and an opportunity to express themselves.

Our smallest students have opinions but their lack of language at 14 months or two years means all too often they don’t get to tell us what those opinions are. And that is frustrating for them. But in art, if they want their duck to be purple or their fish to have seven eyes or their snowman to be a puddle, it’s ok! I’m constantly reminding parents it’s about the process, not the product. We don’t correct a child’s art because there is no “correct” way to create it. Can you imagine if someone had told Picasso the nose doesn’t go there?!

Once children get a little older, we can also start working on the idea of collaboration and cooperation through art. Large group projects teach children they can work together as a community to make something bigger and better than any one of us could have done alone. That ability to recognize you can be a unique individual within a group that works towards a common goal is a hallmark of successful people all over the world.

Thus, Concludes the Lesson

I’m not trying to take the fun out of your baby classes. Just the opposite! Both music and art release dopamine in the brain so they make the process of learning pleasurable. Education should be fun and engaging and you should absolutely revel in every moment of this special time with your child. But don’t sell these experiences short because they are entertaining. They are vital to your child’s health and well-being and are setting them up to love learning for the rest of their lives.

So next time you see your children keeping a steady beat to your Spotify station, or scribbling faces in their pasta sauce at dinner, remind yourself, they are not “just playing”, they are building their brains!

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Photos: Unsplash 

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