13 Benefits Of Music Therapy In Children
Music therapy is the professional use of music and its elements as an intervention in medical or educational contexts. Its ultimate goal is to optimize the quality of life and improve the physical, social, communicative, emotional and intellectual well-being of children.
Although its usefulness and effectiveness have been known since ancient times, it has now become the star of children’s therapies. Well, specialists affirm that music therapy not only tones up relationships of the nervous system, but also regulates circulatory processes and favors glandular secretion.
Certainly, there are several benefits offered by this type of procedure. For this reason, more and more people trust it when solving children’s problems, since it is something that attracts the attention of children. Know all its benefits in this article.
10 benefits of music therapy in children
Sound, rhythms, melody, and harmony are key elements of music therapy. This tool is widely used to improve communication and personal relationships. Likewise, music therapy achieves changes at a physical, emotional, cognitive and social level:
- It acts on areas of development, stimulating the child’s nervous maturation process at the brain level.
- Improves your ability to memorize, focus and concentrate by remembering both lyrics and melodies and rhythms.
- It helps to improve the child’s learning and to work on childhood difficulties in this matter. At the same time, it favors the understanding of concepts.
- Develops the capacities of the intellect. Thus, music therapy stimulates creativity, children’s imagination and mental agility.
- It constitutes a means of socialization between peers and relatives.
- It fosters skills and means of corporal, instrumental, graphic and melodic expression.
- Develops locution (oral expression) through articulation and vocalization. It also stimulates correct breathing to allow phonation.
- Music therapy reinforces the child’s self-esteem and personality through self-realization.
- It favors motor coordination with association and dissociation movements, balance, gait and others.
- Affectively and emotionally sensitizes the child through their aesthetic values.
3 extra advantages of music therapy
Music therapy has the immense value of helping to release all that repressed energy, thus obtaining the correct personal balance through rhythm. Hence, multiple benefits of this useful tool emerge, which has begun to spread due to its great efficiency.
For example, this type of treatment is able to relax or motivate the child. According to the piece chosen and the child’s mood, it can be used to promote relaxing environments or activity. Thus, this external stimulus increases their flexibility and adaptation to the world around them.
All this becomes so beneficial that for several years it has begun to be applied in very specific treatments. Such is the case of children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Specialists and parents of children with this type of pathology have been surprised by its effects.
No less important is the fact that music therapy is also very useful when it comes to treatments that involve chronic pain and other types of diseases.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Because, just to exemplify, these types of procedures are effective in treating language or maturational delays, emotional, behavioral or learning problems, mental retardation, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, etc.
However, it should be clarified that music therapy is not a treasure for a few specific cases. On the contrary, it is a resource that can be used with any child. Well, fun cannot be denied to anyone. Even less when it is useful to stimulate and teach.
