Dance Before Talk: The Benefits and Joy of Music and Dance for Toddlers

Dance is one way that parents and their pre-verbal young children can bond. (Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock)

My 1 year-old loves to dance. If she hears any musical noise, at any time, in any place, a huge smile blossoms across her face, and, propping herself against a couch, chair, or parent’s leg, she begins to bob up and down and stamp her foot. Sometimes, the flood of feeling the music presses into her tiny heart is so overwhelming that she drops on all fours and rocks back and forth, or carefully raises a single leg in a delicate pirouette.

So far, she’s undiscerning in her musical taste. In fact, even non-musical yet rhythmical sounds like the thrumming of the dryer or the rhythm of nursery rhymes will give her the dancing itch. It can’t be resisted: the ponderous little foot begins to pound. The world bursts with a colorful collage of spiraling and twirling sounds streaming about her small curly head, and she hears music everywhere, even in simple daily activities like washing clothes. She wishes to be in sync with the joy of the world.

I’ve long been astonished at the fact that most babies begin to dance even before they begin to speak: 75 percent of babies dance by 9 months. Their first language is not that of words, but that of music. One of our first distinctly human actions, then, is the attempt to harmonize our bodies with the order of the world as expressed in the rhythms and patterns of music. In “Twelfth Night,” Orsino says that music is the food of love, and that certainly seems to be the case for toddlers: music and its physical expression in dance form the first inarticulate murmurings of love for the world and for other human beings.

Toddler dances are often social affairs. My daughter will watch me bob my head, and instantly understand what is meant: we are going to dance together. She understands that this can be a shared activity, so she is not only harmonizing herself with the external order of the world but also bonding with her parents. Research has shown that compared to activities without music, children and parents dancing together promotes prosocial behavior It really does help build parent-child relationships. It’s the food of love.

Mankind’s Love of Patterns

How can this recognition of music (or at least patterned sounds) and the desire to enter into it be so fundamental to human nature that we engage in it even before the dawn of language, and long before the dawn of rationality?

Here, we have a mystery, something so deeply a part of ourselves that it is hard to analyze. One answer might be the desire for order and meaning which must be present, in embryonic form, at least, in the smallest of children.

We are wired to recognize patterns because we know intuitively that patterns carry meaning. And meaning, as psychologist Viktor Frankl has observed, is the one thing human beings won’t live without. Not only do we desire to recognize meaning through order in the world (and music is ordered sound), but we also wish, in some sense, to possess that order and that meaning in ourselves.In the case of dance, we attempt to enter more deeply into the order of music, to “have” it, so to speak, in our bodies.

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Another reason that music appeals to children and even infants is that it moves in the realm of emotions, which (as every parent knows and sometimes bemoans) are more fully developed in a child from the start than the rational intellect is. Little Noah may not be able to articulate the concepts of sadness, rage, or his ideas of justice, but he most certainly experiences the feelings associated with those things when his desire for more cookies encounters unforeseen obstacles. That may be one reason why music appeals to children at such an early age: music speaks directly to the heart, which is the only language children really know prior to the age of reason.

Aristotle spoke to this emotional power of music in his Politics:

“Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change. The habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representations is not far removed from the same feeling about realities. ... Enough has been said to show that music has a power of forming the character.”

This quotation comes from a section within the Politics on education, and, given Aristotle’s observation that music shapes character through training the listener’s emotions, we understand why Aristotle saw music as so important to education.

Music Enriches the Young Mind

Musical education can begin early. Though the validity of the so-called “Mozart effect”—which holds that listening to classical music at an early age increases a child’s intelligence—has been challenged by some scientists, studies show that learning to play an instrument, even in children as young as 3 years old, significantly increases a child’s spatial-temporal reasoning. Another study showed that rats who were exposed to Mozart’s music in utero and then for a period of time after birth were able to complete a maze much faster than rats who listened to minimalist music, white noise, or nothing at all.

Couple these music benefits with the physical and bonding benefits of dance, mentioned above, and you have something profoundly educational at your disposal. In a survey published in the journal Developmental Psychology, almost 100 percent of parents across 15 countries said they danced with their baby, and many of them on a daily basis. This shows how universal this language of dance is, particularly as a way for parents and pre-verbal children to speak to one another.

So, if your toddler hears beautiful music and begins to dance, you may want to encourage it and even join in. The child is expressing a part of your humanity, too.