Have you ever been worried that you can't sing? Has that ever held you back from singing to your wee one? If you answered yes, don't worry you're not alone.
We know, from the many thousands of parents and teachers we have worked with, that people usually understand how important it is to sing to young children. It isn’t often this that needs justifying.
What we do see, though, are parents who fear their voice “isn’t good enough”. They hear us urging the importance of modelling tunefulness and wonder – what if I can’t sing in tune though?
The answer here is, as always, complex.
Babies love our voices. They tune into their families and love them just as they sound. What they need is to HEAR it – regardless of tuneful quality.
They listen to the melody of your speech, the rhythm of your walking – they are tuned into music and looking for it.
If we allow ourselves to deeply know we can reclaim our tuneful singing, if we stop telling ourselves we can’t do it and we don’t have this ability – what we see over and over is that those parents find their tune again.
It takes practise. It takes courage. And it takes belief in yourself.
This means our babies are exposed to singing that IS becoming more tuneful. But more than that – they are exposed to the joy and beauty of any music, to the feeling of music-making and the feeling of having emotions expressed through sound.