2023-04-04_How_to_Invest_in_Your_Children_at_a_Very_Young_Age_Part_11_Develop_Musicality
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00:00:59.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less.
00:01:09.000 | My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host.
00:01:11.000 | Today we continue with our series on how to invest in your children when they are young.
00:01:16.000 | The goal is to help our children to be strong and healthy and beautiful and smart and accomplished and capable, etc.
00:01:24.000 | Because if we can help to facilitate those things, especially when our children are young, they'll be so far ahead of their peers that they'll be able to make their own course and path in life fairly easily.
00:01:36.000 | And I have long believed that an intense focus in some of these areas is a very productive use of our time and our resources, especially financial resources, and that these resources are best invested at a young age.
00:01:50.000 | In today's podcast, we're going to explore a little bit the idea of making your children smarter through music.
00:01:58.000 | Again, throughout this series, I've tried to be very honest with everything that we know about how to help our children to be strong, healthy, accomplished, smart, etc.
00:02:08.000 | Some of the basics are simply genetic potential. You as parents have passed along a certain genetic code, a certain basic innate capacity to your children in terms of their physical health, their potential for their height, for their intelligence, etc.
00:02:24.000 | But then we want to work with that basic genetic potential and help to cultivate it to the maximum that we can.
00:02:31.000 | We want our children to grow as tall as they're capable of, so we feed them. We want them to grow as strong as they're capable of, so we make sure they're exercising.
00:02:39.000 | And we want them to grow as smart as they are capable of, and so we need to nourish and care for the brain.
00:02:45.000 | Today, we're going to discuss music and its impact on the brain, because music is one of those areas where there is good evidence that musicality can affect the brain and the potential of your children in many different ways.
00:03:01.000 | Now, we'll talk about this in the context of consuming music, and also we'll talk about this in the context of expressing music.
00:03:11.000 | Let's begin with just a couple of articles here. I'm going to read from Psychology Today, an article published last year called "Music Can Literally Grow Your Brain," published by Eric Hazeltine, PhD.
00:03:23.000 | Subtitle, "Melodies Can Be As Good For Your Mind As They Are For Your Mood."
00:03:29.000 | And here are the key points.
00:03:30.000 | Listening to music does not make you smarter, as first reported with the Mozart effect, but listening to music can slow cognitive decline.
00:03:41.000 | On the other hand, habitually playing a musical instrument can increase brain tissue volume and improve cognitive skills, such as visual memory.
00:03:50.000 | These benefits are strongest when musical training starts at a young age, but can still be significant when instruments are learned in adulthood.
00:03:58.000 | About 30 years ago, Rauscher et al. published a study of children in the prestigious journal Nature, showing that just listening to Mozart could increase a child's cognitive abilities, such as scores on the Stanford-Binet Subtask on Spatial Reasoning.
00:04:14.000 | Although other researchers later replicated these results, albeit with much smaller effects, in children and adults, today the consensus of neuroscientists is that listening to Mozart or other classical music improves performance not by growing your brain, but by temporarily elevating your arousal and mood so that you perform better.
00:04:36.000 | Thus, the so-called "Mozart effect" is really just an example of the well-known effect of arousal on performance.
00:04:43.000 | Alert people do better on cognitive tasks than sleepy people.
00:04:47.000 | Recently, however, some researchers have started to re-examine the benefits of listening to music, not in children, but in dementia patients.
00:04:55.000 | A 2018 literature review in the journal Dementia Neuropsychologia summarizing the results of 24 different studies concluded that exposing Alzheimer's patients to music, especially familiar music, improved both mood and memory in dementia patients.
00:05:18.000 | Scientists involved in the research hypothesized that musical memories are often preserved in dementia patients, and that activating those memories can help associated memories.
00:05:29.000 | These findings were replicated and extended in a 2021 study published blah blah blah.
00:05:33.000 | But does playing a musical instrument make you smarter?
00:05:36.000 | We can conclude from the above research that listening to music doesn't necessarily make you smarter, but can elevate your mood and arousal and help you temporarily perform better, and even slow cognitive decline later in life.
00:05:49.000 | But what about actively playing a musical instrument versus passively listening to music?
00:05:54.000 | There, the research on positive long-term cognitive effects of music is much more compelling.
00:05:59.000 | Another review article in Dementia Neuropsychologia by Rodriguez et al.
00:06:06.000 | "Musical training, neuroplasticity, and cognition shows that learning to play a musical instrument, then practicing that instrument, can actually grow parts of your brain associated with perceiving and playing music (corpus callosum, cerebellum, hippocampus, temporal neocortex)."
00:06:22.000 | These trophic benefits of playing an instrument are larger the earlier in development musical training starts, but measurable increases in brain tissue size have even been found in musicians who did not start playing an instrument until well into adulthood.
00:06:37.000 | Rodriguez et al. go on to point out that numerous studies suggest that the physical changes to the brain have functional significance, with trained musicians exhibiting elevated performance relative to non-musicians in cognitive tasks such as visuospatial processing and visual memory.
00:06:56.000 | Of course, teasing apart nature-nurture questions, i.e. are musicians just born smarter or become smarter with practice, is not straightforward.
00:07:05.000 | But longitudinal studies involving before and after experiments in individual test subjects by Dr. Lutz Janka at the University of Zurich support the idea that brain and cognitive changes associated with playing an instrument can be acquired versus inherited.
00:07:21.000 | One more thing before you take up an instrument to grow your brain.
00:07:25.000 | The foregoing studies strongly suggest that you can grow your brain, improve cognitive skills, and delay cognitive decline by regularly playing a musical instrument.
00:07:35.000 | But if you are really motivated to beef up your brain and cognitive skills, a broad range of studies in brain plasticity, summarized by Dr. Lawrence Katz in the book Keep Your Brain Alive, suggest that you should not stick with one instrument, but constantly teach yourself to play unfamiliar instruments so that you expose your brain to constant novelty.
00:07:56.000 | According to Dr. Katz, your brain is like your muscles. If you do weight training at constant loads, your muscles will grow to a certain point, then stop gaining strength. Just as with your muscles, if you want to continue to grow your brain, you must continuously challenge it with novel or increasingly difficult tasks.
00:08:12.000 | I know that sounds like an uncomfortable amount of work, but we can't stay comfortable while venturing out of our comfort zones, can we?
00:08:19.000 | Now I want to pivot to a different article called How Music Affects the Brain from the website bbrainfit.com.
00:08:25.000 | Now in this article, all of these claims are linked to various other articles. I have several of the studies, looked through them as a non-scientist, just generally interested to read a little bit about it.
00:08:36.000 | And they're too meaty to go through, but let me read a few excerpts from this article from bbrainfit.
00:08:42.000 | Subtitle or subhead. "Music improves brain health and function in many ways. It makes you smarter, happier, and more productive at any age. Listening is good. Playing is better."
00:08:54.000 | "Music has played an important part in every human culture, both past and present. People around the world respond to music in a universal way, and now advances in neuroscience enable researchers to measure just how music affects the brain."
00:09:07.000 | "The interest in the effects of music on the brain has produced a new field of research called neuromusicology, which explores how the nervous system reacts to music."
00:09:16.000 | "And the evidence is in, music activates every part of the brain."
00:09:21.000 | "Playing, or even just listening to music, can make you smarter, happier, healthier, and more productive at all stages of life."
00:09:29.000 | Dropping down. Why musicians have healthier brains.
00:09:32.000 | "For evidence of how music affects the brain, it makes sense to look at the brains of those who play a lot of music, professional musicians."
00:09:39.000 | "Brain scans show that their brains are different than those of non-musicians."
00:09:44.000 | "Musicians have bigger, better connected, more sensitive brains."
00:09:48.000 | "Musicians have superior working memory, auditory skills, and mental flexibility."
00:09:53.000 | "Their brains are physically more symmetrical and respond more symmetrically when listening to music."
00:09:58.000 | "Areas of the brain responsible for motor control, auditory processing, and spatial coordination are larger."
00:10:04.000 | "Musicians also have a larger corpus callosum."
00:10:07.000 | "This is the band of nerve fibers that transfers information between the two hemispheres of the brain."
00:10:12.000 | "This increase in size indicates that the two sides of musicians' brains are better at communicating with each other."
00:10:18.000 | "While most of us aren't professional musicians, we still listen to a lot of music, an average of 32 hours per week."
00:10:24.000 | "This is enough time for music to have an effect on the brains of non-musicians as well."
00:10:30.000 | There's a section here called "How Music Improves Mood and Reduces Stress."
00:10:36.000 | If you're interested in that, just induce what you already know about.
00:10:40.000 | There's also a section on how music can make you creative, but I want to drop down to the benefits of music for young brains.
00:10:48.000 | In the 1990s, the effect of music on the brain was popularized as the Mozart effect.
00:10:53.000 | This theory purported that listening to music composed by Mozart made kids smarter.
00:10:58.000 | Parents exposed their babies to the music of Mozart to give their brains a jumpstart, often even before they were born.
00:11:05.000 | The accepted theory now is that while taking music lessons as a child enhances brain function and structure,
00:11:12.000 | there's nothing uniquely beneficial about the music of Mozart.
00:11:16.000 | Children with musical backgrounds do better in subjects like language, reading, and math,
00:11:20.000 | and have better fine motor skills than their non-musical classmates.
00:11:24.000 | Early music lessons encourage brain plasticity, the brain's capacity to change and grow.
00:11:30.000 | Just a half-hour music lesson increases blood flow in the left hemisphere of the brain.
00:11:35.000 | And if kids don't stick with their music lessons forever, that's okay.
00:11:38.000 | There's evidence that when music training begins young, the brain enhancement that takes place can last a lifetime.
00:11:44.000 | When children had as little as four years of music lessons, they experienced long-term cognitive benefits that researchers could detect 40 years later.
00:11:52.000 | Kids who sing together in a choir report higher satisfaction in all their classes.
00:11:57.000 | Not just music. Most studies on music in the brain have been done on school-age kids, but it looks like it's never too young to start.
00:12:04.000 | Music lessons of sorts, playing drums and singing nursery rhymes, were given to babies before they could walk or talk.
00:12:10.000 | Babies who had music lessons communicated better and showed earlier and more sophisticated brain responses to music.
00:12:17.000 | Music makes children better students.
00:12:20.000 | Many schools have cut music programs due to loss of funding.
00:12:23.000 | This is widely believed by parents and educators to be a big mistake.
00:12:27.000 | Music, whether taught in or outside of school, helps students excel in the following ways.
00:12:32.000 | Improved language development.
00:12:34.000 | Improved test scores.
00:12:35.000 | Increased brain connectivity.
00:12:37.000 | Increased spatial intelligence.
00:12:39.000 | Modest increase in IQ.
00:12:41.000 | Perhaps counterintuitively, music can help students excel in science.
00:12:45.000 | Spatial intelligence, for instance, helps students understand how things work together.
00:12:50.000 | This skill is critical in careers like architecture, engineering, math, and computer science.
00:12:55.000 | Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Albert Einstein was an accomplished violinist with a lifelong passion for music.
00:13:02.000 | He believed that the theory of relativity occurred to him by intuition and that music was the driving force.
00:13:10.000 | So by depriving students of music lessons, we might be depriving the world of its next great scientific genius.
00:13:17.000 | Goes on and talks about how music naturally helps people with anxiety, etc.
00:13:21.000 | I think most of that stuff is intuitive to us because we enjoy listening to music.
00:13:25.000 | So you can go and look into this more if you are interested.
00:13:29.000 | I just want to read you one more abstract from a paper entitled "Practicing a Musical Instrument in Childhood is Associated with Enhanced Verbal Ability and Non-Verbal Reasoning"
00:13:42.000 | published October 29, 2008.
00:13:45.000 | Background.
00:13:46.000 | In this study, we investigated the association between instrumental music training in childhood and outcomes closely related to music training, as well as those more distantly related.
00:13:55.000 | Methodology and principal findings.
00:13:57.000 | Children who received at least three years (the median was 4.6 years) of instrumental music training outperformed their control counterparts on two outcomes closely related to music (auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills)
00:14:12.000 | and on two outcomes distantly related to music (vocabulary and non-verbal reasoning skills).
00:14:18.000 | Duration of training also predicted these outcomes.
00:14:21.000 | Contrary to previous research, instrumental music training was not associated with heightened spatial skills, phonemic awareness, or mathematical abilities.
00:14:32.000 | Conclusions and significance.
00:14:34.000 | While these results are correlational only, the strong predictive effect of training duration suggests that instrumental music training may enhance auditory discrimination, fine motor skills, vocabulary, and non-verbal reasoning.
00:14:46.000 | Alternative explanations for these results are discussed.
00:14:48.000 | So, none of this is, I would say, proven, just as is always in these realms of science, evidence.
00:14:55.000 | And I think we should go beyond just the scientific endeavor.
00:14:58.000 | I think it's interesting to think about what might help to make your children smarter, but smarter is not the only thing.
00:15:06.000 | I think music should be looked at primarily as something that's simply an enjoyable part of life.
00:15:12.000 | Many people, I'd say most people probably, most people have some form of music that they enjoy.
00:15:18.000 | Whether it's pumping your head to some heavy metal while you're working out, or whether it's singing in a church choir, there's some form of music that appeals to most of us.
00:15:29.000 | And when we start to enjoy that music, it can change our state.
00:15:33.000 | And being able to create music is something that is commonly enjoyed across mankind.
00:15:39.000 | And so, I want us to incorporate this into our children's lives.
00:15:44.000 | Now, this is one area where, with my own personal experience, I have wrestled a lot over the years with how and why to do it.
00:15:53.000 | Let me describe my experience briefly.
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00:16:27.000 | I come from what I think could be accurately described as a fairly musical family.
00:16:33.000 | It was important to my parents that their children be able to have some knowledge and appreciation and understanding of music.
00:16:42.000 | And so, they sacrificed quite diligently so that all of us would have some form of musical training.
00:16:49.000 | All of us took piano for varying amounts of time in varying ways, but all of my siblings were taught piano.
00:16:58.000 | And then most of my siblings went on to learn other instruments.
00:17:02.000 | Some of my, again, everything from the harmonica to the violin to guitar, many different instruments, cello, guitar, bass, double bass, etc.
00:17:14.000 | Many instruments are represented and music was something that we enjoyed as a family.
00:17:19.000 | After the hard work of raising musical children, one of the things my parents did is we would regularly get together and have an evening of music.
00:17:26.000 | And this is something that I still enjoy to this day.
00:17:29.000 | I love to host evenings of music at my home, whether it's to get a bunch of people together to sing Christmas carols or whatever it is, I enjoy music.
00:17:40.000 | However, I myself am not an accomplished musician.
00:17:44.000 | I had a number of years of piano lessons. I don't remember what age I began, but I remember that I didn't really ever like it.
00:17:51.000 | And while looking back, I can see that it was something that I had actually made good progress over the years, it wasn't something that I particularly enjoyed.
00:18:03.000 | And so after my parents spending years nagging me to practice and practice, and finally, through whatever reason, I think I finally wore them out and convinced them to let me stop in seventh grade.
00:18:16.000 | And that's when I remember stopping playing piano.
00:18:20.000 | And to this day, I'm a little bit annoyed that they let me stop because I now look back and recognize that if I had just pushed through a little bit more, then I would have been able to build a skill to the point where it could be a useful part of my life.
00:18:37.000 | And over the last years as an adult, for the last 10 plus years, I've had a piano in my home, but I haven't ever succeeded at reinstituting that habit and causing myself to again become an accomplished piano player.
00:18:51.000 | It's still an aspiration of mine, it's an ambition, but it's not something that I have thus far been able to accomplish.
00:18:58.000 | And as with many things, you look back and recognize the foregone benefits of what you could have had if you'd stuck with it as a child, and alas, that's not the case.
00:19:11.000 | So I've often wondered about the idea of starting children on music at an early age, because it seems that unless a child expresses an interest in music, there's a whole lot of work that parents have to do to keep a child disciplined to his musical studies.
00:19:29.000 | And when I enrolled my eldest child and found a piano teacher a number of years ago, I faced this again.
00:19:36.000 | I said, "Am I going to require you to practice? If you don't practice, this isn't going to do you any good. So am I going to require you to practice? And how should I require you to practice?"
00:19:44.000 | And as a parent, there's a certain measure of discipline that you want to impose upon your children for their own good, but finding that sweet spot where there's enough discipline, where they get the good out of it, but you're not all the time just nagging your children to do stuff, is challenging.
00:20:02.000 | And so we've done music lessons, piano lessons, off and on, here and there, based upon when I could find a music teacher.
00:20:09.000 | I've observed, however, that children who are a little bit older can make so much faster progress.
00:20:15.000 | And I think that all the lessons that I discussed when we talked about mathematics apply similarly to the space of music.
00:20:22.000 | There are certainly some child prodigies who, for whatever reason, they pick up an instrument and they make rapid progress even at a very young age.
00:20:30.000 | We all love to see the videos of the five-year-old playing some spectacular piano concert.
00:20:35.000 | But that's not normal. I think the normal aspect is that the five-year-old will spend a lot of time working on a musical skill, and there's still not a lot of musicality at the age of seven.
00:20:46.000 | And yet you come along with, say, a 15-year-old who takes those same lessons, and it seems to me, and from talking to piano teachers, etc., it seems that the child can do in about a month or two what took two years for the very young child.
00:21:04.000 | And so I myself haven't pushed music lessons on my children very much, partly primarily due to not having an appropriate teacher, doing a lot of traveling, etc., partly due to having a bunch of other stuff that we do, but partly also due to the idea that I think that it's one of those things that's easier as children are older and they can make faster progress.
00:21:26.000 | Now, the best argument against the waiting has to do with these brain science findings.
00:21:32.000 | I think there's, if we look at music study beyond just simply wanting to help children develop musicality, but if we look at it instead as a component of helping our children to be intelligent, helping their fine motor skills to develop, helping them to build these new skill sets,
00:21:55.000 | and the musical outcomes are just a sideline benefit, then I think it makes a lot of sense.
00:22:02.000 | And it does make a lot of sense to incorporate music at a young age when children have more time.
00:22:12.000 | If you look at teenagers especially who engage with music a lot, what is necessary for them to make progress is simply abundant amounts of time.
00:22:24.000 | And they have to love to practice, they have to really enjoy making music.
00:22:28.000 | And if there can be an enjoyment of making music, then I think the children can really be much more engaged in it.
00:22:37.000 | When I look back at my own childhood and what I'll call the mistake that I think my parents made, although I wouldn't try to say, I mean I don't think that was wrong of them,
00:22:48.000 | but what I would say is looking back now, the error that I see, the thing that could have been changed, is that I was studying classical music, which I didn't particularly care for.
00:23:00.000 | And if they had simply switched me to studying pop music in some form, rather than classical music, then perhaps that would have been enough to light the spark.
00:23:11.000 | And this is where I think a lot of guitar players especially often get connected.
00:23:16.000 | When I see young men and women who really love to play guitar, it's usually because they're connected with some form of popular music.
00:23:22.000 | Yes, there's classical guitar, etc., but they're usually engaged with some form of popular music.
00:23:28.000 | And in hindsight, I now look back and realize that if I had just had a break from classical music, and I'd spent a year or two studying pop music,
00:23:38.000 | and I had gotten to taste the idea of being able to play popular songs, being able to liven up a party with a well-played piece that everybody loves,
00:23:47.000 | being able to sit down and rock out a rock as bar song, the way I'm thinking here of the Top Gun scene from the 80s Top Gun,
00:23:57.000 | where you've got a guy sitting around on the piano playing out some rock as bar song.
00:24:02.000 | That kind of experience, I think, is the kind of thing that helps musicians to develop.
00:24:07.000 | Whereas being a classical pianist, it may, and I think almost certainly is, the ultimate form of musical training,
00:24:15.000 | but classical concert halls are not necessarily full of adoring fans.
00:24:21.000 | There is a subset of the population that enjoys those, but they're not full of adoring fans.
00:24:27.000 | And so, looking back, a little bit of Billy Joel, a little bit of even Michael Buble or Frank Sinatra,
00:24:34.000 | even what some version of popular music would have made a big difference for me and my interest in piano playing.
00:24:42.000 | And so I share that with you, that if you are committed to musicality and you're helping your children to learn,
00:24:49.000 | the classical tradition is certainly highbrow and I think very effective at producing accomplished musicians.
00:24:57.000 | But if your child is bristling at the idea of continuing music education,
00:25:04.000 | you might consider dropping the classical music for a time and engaging more with popular music and see what happens with that.
00:25:14.000 | Being able to play a John Legend or Alicia Keys song or something like that will probably do much more for your child's interest in music
00:25:21.000 | than being able to play a sophisticated classical piece.
00:25:25.000 | There are other things that, looking back, I see could have been done to spark my musical interest.
00:25:31.000 | Many of those things are just things that are easier to do today than before.
00:25:36.000 | One of the things that we try to do, we do it poorly at the moment, but we're going to do it better in the days to come,
00:25:42.000 | is composer studies.
00:25:45.000 | And at the end of this podcast episode, I will append the audio from Sonia Schaefer,
00:25:51.000 | she of the website Simply Charlotte Mason, and her instructions on how to do a composer study.
00:25:57.000 | Because I was playing classical music but didn't really have any appreciation of classical music.
00:26:03.000 | Now today, I think of, I mean there's so many amazing YouTube channels of wonderful music,
00:26:08.000 | musicians that you can get inspired and you can inspire your children with lots of resources that we didn't have back then.
00:26:15.000 | So the point is, inspire a connection.
00:26:19.000 | On the topic of composer study, I do think that musicality can start with appreciation.
00:26:24.000 | You want your children to learn to appreciate music.
00:26:28.000 | And that means they need to be exposed to good quality music.
00:26:33.000 | All of us have a style or a genre of music that we consider to be good quality,
00:26:39.000 | and we're amazed when other people don't consider it to be good quality.
00:26:44.000 | I think we're all probably a little sensitive about, "This is my favorite band, this is my favorite artist."
00:26:49.000 | And we know that a lot of other people don't like this band or artist.
00:26:54.000 | And I don't think it's necessary to always focus on the toniest of preferences.
00:27:03.000 | Popular music, I think, is wonderful.
00:27:06.000 | However, when it comes to teaching the foundations of music, I think there really is benefit to the classics,
00:27:13.000 | to classical music and beautifully structured music.
00:27:18.000 | If you look at the strongest popular musicians, they will often be deeply rooted in classical music,
00:27:26.000 | in terms of where their skill development comes from.
00:27:30.000 | And so, in terms of a singer, you'll have some singer, I think one of my favorites would be the song,
00:27:38.000 | "Hello Darkness, My Old Friend" by the heavy metal guy that sang it.
00:27:43.000 | I forget his name. I don't listen to heavy metal, don't know his name.
00:27:46.000 | But he comes out with this incredible rendition of it.
00:27:48.000 | But one of the things that is so obvious in his singing of the song is that he has classical training.
00:27:54.000 | And classical voice training can be picked up and it sets a foundation for popular music that you can't achieve in any other way.
00:28:07.000 | This is true in many fields. Here I think of an author like J.K. Rowling, who came to fame as a popular literature writer.
00:28:16.000 | None of her writing is highbrow, it's not great literature, it's just popular.
00:28:21.000 | And I'm not saying it's bad, it's poorly written. It's just, it's not highbrow.
00:28:27.000 | And yet, her training came in studying the classics.
00:28:32.000 | So she's classically educated and then she was able to take that skill set and apply it in the field of modern popular children's literature.
00:28:42.000 | So if you want your child to go far, you're going to need to understand the classical training,
00:28:52.000 | the deep classical training in whatever field you are interested in.
00:28:56.000 | And then at a later date, if your child desires, he or she can of course move into the popular realm.
00:29:04.000 | But someone who goes along that formation path is going to be more successful than somebody who only has just a light exposure to the popular work of today.
00:29:14.000 | Because if that's the highest, if the popular work, the popular level work is the highest form of the art that the child has engaged with,
00:29:24.000 | he's not going to have the same deep wellspring that somebody who's engaged with the all-time classics of the field.
00:29:34.000 | So consider that when it comes to music.
00:29:36.000 | Music begins with appreciation. Again, include composer studies if possible, or at least just expose your children to great music.
00:29:45.000 | You get to be the judge of that, but expose them to great music.
00:29:49.000 | If you're going to listen to music, choose something that is worth listening to. Choose something that is genuinely attractive rather than just something that happens to be on.
00:29:58.000 | In today's world, this is easier than it's ever been due to the fact of how easy it is for us to customize our playlists versus just listening to whatever radio station happens to be on.
00:30:07.000 | But choose great music.
00:30:09.000 | Listening to great music may not make your child smarter, but it can increase mood and is probably a necessary precondition for your child to have enough interest in music to want to create it.
00:30:20.000 | When we pivot to the creating side, I don't have a lot of informed positions to share with you due to, as I said, no success in this area.
00:30:33.000 | I wanted to say modest success, but I have no success in this area thus far in helping to develop these skills with my children.
00:30:40.000 | My opinions very quickly are these.
00:30:42.000 | Number one, if you are going to introduce an instrument, there are a few instruments that make a lot of sense to start with.
00:30:51.000 | Those instruments would probably involve some form of chord making so that your child can understand chord theory and how that works.
00:31:03.000 | Probably the two obvious starting points would be either piano or guitar, and both of them together.
00:31:10.000 | Piano has the benefit of being perhaps one of the more straightforward.
00:31:15.000 | Pianos are everywhere, they're super popular in our day, they're widely available, and they're fantastic for understanding chord theory, for developing skills.
00:31:23.000 | You've got the whole classical piano training world. It's remarkable.
00:31:27.000 | Guitars have the benefit of also being available everywhere.
00:31:31.000 | The guitar is always around. They're more portable. You can take them, you can use them.
00:31:35.000 | And if a child learns something on piano or something on guitar, that's a skill that can go with them for his entire lifetime.
00:31:42.000 | There are obviously other great instruments.
00:31:45.000 | Think of here the Suzuki program for violinists and other instruments as well.
00:31:50.000 | But young children can learn an instrument like violin.
00:31:53.000 | The problem with instruments like violin or with clarinet or trumpet is, at least for me, that those instruments fit in best generally with a band.
00:32:03.000 | Whereas guitar or piano are useful on their own.
00:32:08.000 | You can accompany a group, you can lead a sing-along, you can do whatever it is.
00:32:13.000 | If that's your interest, that's my interest.
00:32:15.000 | If that's your interest, then guitar and piano are just more useful than trumpet.
00:32:21.000 | It's hard to lead a sing-along of a group of people in a rousing hymn or chorus of some kind with a trumpet.
00:32:30.000 | Trumpet is obviously a spectacular instrument, a wonderful to listen to in its place, but it's part of a band.
00:32:36.000 | So if you were only going to choose one, I think why not introduce a little bit of practicality into your instrument choice.
00:32:44.000 | Piano has the disadvantage of being large and bulky if you're working with a large acoustic piano,
00:32:50.000 | but keyboards are pretty inexpensive and pretty portable and can actually probably be a better choice than a large acoustic piano
00:32:58.000 | due to their ability to connect easily with electronic devices using the MIDI note system.
00:33:06.000 | So here we pivot to how do you learn?
00:33:09.000 | Obviously a great teacher is probably key.
00:33:12.000 | I don't know how to tell you how to find a great teacher other than word of mouth, friends, etc.
00:33:16.000 | I don't have a framework for what makes a great teacher beyond what I would love to see is a teacher that can inspire and impart passion.
00:33:24.000 | I have had a couple of good piano teachers that I've liked, meaning for the children,
00:33:29.000 | but so far I haven't had a great one where it's really been fantastic.
00:33:35.000 | What I'm getting ready to try is the use of some of the apps.
00:33:40.000 | I'm going to try one of the piano apps in the coming months and see how that works.
00:33:45.000 | We've had some other priorities as a family. I've just let the piano go for a while,
00:33:49.000 | but I think this is one of those areas where some of these piano learning apps are probably a good in-between space between a teacher and nothing.
00:34:01.000 | If the cost of a teacher or the difficulty of finding a teacher, or in my case, sometimes just the weekly commitments of going to a teacher's studio,
00:34:09.000 | if some of those things aren't appropriate for you, then here is where I think an app might bridge the gap.
00:34:15.000 | As I look at myself as well, where I've had the most success in studying piano has been when I've worked with a virtual class.
00:34:21.000 | I haven't previously tried one of the straight-up piano apps, but I've worked with some virtual classes, virtual teachers, where everything was asynchronous,
00:34:29.000 | and that's worked better for me than working with an in-person teacher.
00:34:33.000 | I don't think it's as good as a teacher. You need the feedback from a quality teacher,
00:34:37.000 | but I think it's a pretty cool in-between area and worth considering.
00:34:41.000 | If you're looking to introduce piano or introduce guitar and you don't have a great system,
00:34:50.000 | I think you could do a lot worse than just going and getting a keyboard and a guitar and grabbing an iPad app or something
00:34:59.000 | where there's an opportunity for your child to learn some simple songs and see what sticks.
00:35:04.000 | And then, if appropriate, go and find a great music teacher at that point.
00:35:09.000 | The last comment I would like to make is on the topic of singing, and this does not relate to the intelligence of your child,
00:35:18.000 | but it does relate to helping give your child simply a broad range of skills.
00:35:24.000 | I'm not aware of any information that would indicate that singing or being a trained singer only increases the IQ
00:35:32.000 | or has all those intelligence benefits of creating music and hand-eye coordination, etc.
00:35:38.000 | But having a little bit of singing training is probably a great way to invest into your child,
00:35:44.000 | into self-confidence and into social status.
00:35:47.000 | Very few of us are interested at all in becoming professional singers,
00:35:52.000 | but it would be nice to at least not be scared of being able to sing a piece of music to a group of assembled people.
00:36:01.000 | And in our modern society, I think, unfortunately, this is something that we've lost,
00:36:05.000 | and I think this is a really beautiful part of history.
00:36:08.000 | If you go back and you watch a period epic of, I don't know, Pride and Prejudice,
00:36:13.000 | you'll see that a form of entertainment, at least pictured in the movies,
00:36:18.000 | is that a group of people would gather around in a music room, somebody would play the harpsichord, somebody would sing.
00:36:24.000 | That's a form of entertainment.
00:36:26.000 | And in our modern era, I don't see why it shouldn't still be a form of entertainment.
00:36:31.000 | Coming together and making music, creating music, singing it, etc.
00:36:35.000 | These are fun and social and very healthy activities.
00:36:39.000 | But people who haven't had even just a little bit of musical training often don't feel confident in their abilities.
00:36:45.000 | And a little bit of professional training in how to sing can make a big difference in the sound of your child's voice
00:36:53.000 | and how confident your child feels.
00:36:56.000 | And this is one of those things where I doubt that 10 years of singing training is necessary for most of us.
00:37:02.000 | But even just a year or two of singing lessons, be it physical lessons in person, be it virtual lessons with a teacher,
00:37:08.000 | helping your child to achieve at least 80 or 90% of his potential, of the natural potential of his voice, I think is really wonderful.
00:37:18.000 | And by the way, these singing techniques that can be learned are also techniques that can translate over to public speaking,
00:37:26.000 | and that can be useful in other areas.
00:37:29.000 | So I think one of those goals that should be on our list as parents is to make sure that if our child is going to come to our funeral,
00:37:38.000 | and then he should feel confident of coming to our funeral and singing a solo to honor his dearly beloved departed deceased father.
00:37:47.000 | So consider bringing in some singing lessons into your child's life.
00:37:52.000 | I think there's a whole list of skills and capabilities that can dramatically enhance the social well-being of your children.
00:38:01.000 | I'm not intending to incorporate that into this particular series, but I want you to think about those.
00:38:07.000 | For example, dancing lessons.
00:38:09.000 | Your child is certainly going to attend various dancing occasions.
00:38:15.000 | I remember the first time I went to a school dance in middle school, and I had had no exposure to dance.
00:38:20.000 | And I remember, "What do you do? How do you do this?"
00:38:23.000 | And so middle school, high school, college, all throughout life, your child is going to attend various functions.
00:38:31.000 | Ever since I learned to dance, it has made those functions very modestly.
00:38:37.000 | I'm not a great dancer. I'm not trying to claim great credit, but at least enjoy a few steps of it.
00:38:42.000 | And it made a dramatic difference in my personal confidence and my enjoyment of social events.
00:38:47.000 | And so if you sit down and make a list of those things, what are those things that would help my children to feel confident?
00:38:54.000 | A little bit of musicality, being able to sit down at the piano, play out two or three interesting popular pieces,
00:38:59.000 | even a simple version of them.
00:39:01.000 | Most people don't know how simple or complex a song is, but having a repertoire of, again, maybe four or five.
00:39:09.000 | Four or five popular music pieces, being able to sing four or five songs that are well-suited to the voice of your child
00:39:15.000 | and the culture that you live in, being able to dance in a couple different genres of music,
00:39:20.000 | having a few other little bits of athletic skill.
00:39:23.000 | These are maybe having some lessons, of course, in public speaking, building some confidence there.
00:39:29.000 | These are the kinds of things that you should be giving to your children to help their personal self-confidence,
00:39:35.000 | their social standing, etc.
00:39:38.000 | And in some cases, there are things that you can do at a young age.
00:39:41.000 | You need to help your children not only be smart, but also to be accomplished
00:39:45.000 | and help them to be strong and filled with self-confidence that comes from a true ability,
00:39:54.000 | so that as they pass through those difficult adolescent, teenage, and college years,
00:39:59.000 | that they are not on the lowest rungs of the social pecking order.
00:40:05.000 | Make sure that they have at least reasonable competence in these different areas.
00:40:11.000 | And singing lessons are a good component of that.
00:40:13.000 | That's all I have to say on this topic. I want, as you go, though, click the link in the description
00:40:18.000 | and watch the 10-minute YouTube video by educator Sonia Schaefer called "How to do music study."
00:40:26.000 | If you do nothing else, you can at least start exposing your children to great music with so-called music study.
00:40:33.000 | Click the link in the bio and check that out.
00:40:35.000 | Also remember, I am accepting consulting calls here during the month of April.
00:40:39.000 | If you can't speak to me personally and book a consulting call, make sure you hurry and do that.
00:40:43.000 | We've sold out, I think we're at 40%.
00:40:45.000 | We still have a lot of spots still open, but only during the month of April.
00:40:48.000 | So go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult, radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult.
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