To calm the baby, better to sing than talk

Cry, cry and keep crying. It seems that he is not hungry, we rock him, we give him the pacifier, we talk to him, we walk him ... We have tried everything and the baby does not calm down. All? Have we sung him? Maybe this is one of the best ways to reassure the baby or at least, as one study just showed, singing to the baby is better than talking to him to calm down.

Specifically, children aged six to nine months remain calm twice as long when they hear a song (even if they don't know it) than when they hear someone speak.

The work has been prepared by specialists from the Center for Brain, Music and Language Research, from the University of Montreal, in Canada, and published in the journal "Infancy". For the experiments, music and language of Turkish origin were used, so that the children were not familiar with them.

Although the parents were in the room, they were placed behind the babies and the stimuli came to them through recordings (words and music), so as to ensure that the infants did not receive any social interaction for their reactions.

Being strict, we should say that music makes the baby calm for longer than words. And the experiment was carried out so that the children, calm, were exposed to music and words. The recordings stopped when the babies began to feel uneasy (with gestures to start crying): nine minutes in the case of music, but only about four minutes in the case of words.

We might think that of course, we talk about unknown music or voices. But the results were practically the same when it was mom who, in her mother tongue, sang to them and then spoke to them: the music wins to calm the offspring.

So, for me, this study is almost an ode to the lullaby, the babysitters, the songs and the nursery rhymes, although their authors talk more than they want to investigate how far they can help emotional self-control of children. Babies at these ages.

We already saw that babies are born programmed for dancing, but it is that people are also naturally captivated by music, babies and adults, as can be seen in our unconscious reactions when we move a foot or head synchronizing with the music that we like.

In any case, one last recommendation if it doesn't work either sing to reassure the baby: We can prove with this curious announcement that it has an effectiveness of 96% to calm children. Be that as it may, we should not ignore the crying of the baby.