One of our favorite child development gurus is Sarah Ockwell-Smith, a British author and parenting expert.

She shares this “Neuroscience Nugget” with parents:

If your toddler regularly listens to music, their prefrontal cortex and auditory cortex, the parts of the brain which help to process speech, will be more developed than toddlers who are not regularly surrounded by music.

If your toddler regularly listens to music, especially in a playful way (singing nursery rhymes with you for instance), it can have an amazing positive effect on their brain.

You don’t have to be musically gifted yourself, just introduce music into your everyday life, sing to your child (it doesn’t matter how off key!), dance to fun music together, consider musical toys and just have fun with sounds!

Here at Kindermusik and Song of the Heart Studios we’ve known this for ages. Neuroscientists, musicians, educators, parents, and child development experts agree: music is like superfood for your child’s brain.

Each week when you come to class you are giving your child’s a brain a boost. You are giving them a super-dose of the only stimulus that lights up all areas of their brain. You’re boosting their verbal development, their cognitive development, their social development, their motor development, and their emotional development.

And the best part about Kindermusik is that it gives your child this boost without any stress of performance for you or for them. There are no wrong ways to experience a Kindermusik class. We are process oriented, not performance oriented. So even if you can’t sing in tune or know how to play an instrument, it doesn’t matter. Just by coming to class, or playing your current unit’s album on the Kindermusik app, or singing an I Love You Ritual you learned in class during diaper changes, you are giving your child the gift of music and all the benefits that flow from it.

You can feel good about that.