Parenting Musically

Parents use music in family life to accomplish practical tasks, make relational connections, and guide their children’s musical development. Parenting Musically portrays the musicking of eight diverse Cleveland-area families in home, school, and community settings. Family musical interactions are analyzed using the concepts of musical parenting (actions to support a child’s musical development) and parenting musically (using music to accomplish extramusical parenting goals), arguing the importance of recognizing and valuing both modes. An additional construct, practical~relational musicking, lends nuance to the analysis of family musical engagement. Practical musicking refers to musicking for a practical purpose, such as learning a scale or passing the time in a car; relational musicking is musicking that deepens relationships with self, siblings, parents, or community members, such as a grandmother singing to her grandchildren via FaceTime as a way to feel connected. Families who embraced both practical and relational musicking expressed satisfaction in long-term musical involvement. Weaving together themes of conscious and intuitive parenting, the rewards and struggles of musical practice, the role of mutuality in community musicking, and parents’ responses to media messages surrounding music and parenting, the discussion incorporates research in music education, psychology, family studies, and sociology. This book serves to highlight the multifaceted nature of families’ engagement in music; the author urges music education practitioners and administrators to consider this diversity of engagement when approaching curricular decisions.

Conscious and Intuitive Parenting With Music at Home

Within the sphere of the home and car, the families in this study expressed and demonstrated a broad range of parenting musically and musical parenting behaviors, approaches, and perceptions that were marked by varying degrees of intentionality on the part of parents. Some parents very carefully chose to expose their children to a varied listening diet or use music to reset the mood in the home; others were seemingly unaware of the many musical elements in their daily routines until they started discussing specifics during interviews. This chapter argues that by heightening one’s awareness of the musical moments at home and in the car, parents may increase their enjoyment of family musicking and recognize the multifaceted values of it.

The Effects of Maternal Mirroring on the Development of Infant Social Expressiveness: The Case of Infant Cleft Lip

Parent-infant social interactions start early in development, with infants showing active communicative expressions by just two months. A key question is how this social capacity develops. Maternal mirroring of infant expressions is considered an important, intuitive, parenting response, but evidence is sparse in the first two months concerning the conditions under which mirroring occurs and its developmental sequelae, including in clinical samples where the infant’s social expressiveness may be affected. We investigated these questions by comparing the development of mother-infant interactions between a sample where the infant had cleft lip and a normal, unaffected, comparison sample. We videotaped dyads in their homes five times from one to ten weeks and used a microanalytic coding scheme for maternal and infant behaviours, including infant social expressions, and maternal mirroring and marking responses. We also recorded maternal gaze to the infant, using eye-tracking glasses. Although infants with cleft lip did show communicative behaviours, the rate of their development was slower than in comparison infants. This group difference was mediated by a lower rate of mirroring of infant expressions by mothers of infants with cleft lip; this effect was, in turn, partly accounted for by reduced gaze to the infant’s mouth, although the clarity of infant social expressions (indexed by cleft severity) and maternal self-blame regarding the cleft were also influential. Results indicate the robustness of parent-infant interactions but also their sensitivity to specific variations in interactants’ appearance and behaviour. Parental mirroring appears critical in infant social development, likely supported by the mirror neuron system and underlying clinical and, possibly, cultural differences in infant behaviour. These findings suggest new avenues for clinical intervention.

Mapping Facial Expression to Internal States Based on Intuitive Parenting

Sympathy is a key issue in interaction and communication between robots and their users. In developmental psychology, intuitive parenting is considered the maternal scaffolding upon which children develop sympathy when caregivers mimic or exaggerate the child’s emotional facial expressions [1]. We model human intuitive parenting using a robot that associates a caregiver’s mimicked or exaggerated facial expressions with the robot’s internal state to learn a sympathetic response. The internal state space and facial expressions are defined using psychological studies and change dynamically in response to external stimuli. After learning, the robot responds to the caregiver’s internal state by observing human facial expressions. The robot then expresses its own internal state facially if synchronization evokes a response to the caregiver’s internal state.