Can music help to improve parent-child communication? Learning music with parents – an Argentine experience

Abstract

How often do parents have the opportunity to share an organised activity with their children throughout the school year? How often do parents have the chance to be part of their children's musical socialisation? Those were some of the questions that led us to consider the idea of a musical programme for parents to share with their children and called ‘Playing music with mum or dad’. This paper reports about the consequences of this programme implemented for the first time in Argentina at the Collegium Musicum of Buenos Aires in 1991. Although the initial intention was just to offer a musical experience for parents to share with their children once a week throughout the school term, in the course of time the real benefit of this activity showed up, revealing that through this proposal, parents began to relate to their children in a dimension far beyond music. Communication became one of the most important – although underlying aims – of this programme. The idea was also to evaluate if this could be a good starting point for parents to understand their educational function, to be aware of the value of music education and the value of educating for freedom and love.