Singing Soothes The Savage Infant, Clinical Trial Says

Singing to your baby can soothe them considerably and improve their overall mood, a new clinical trial shows.

Parents given smartphone-based music enrichment training sang more often to their babies, and those babies were generally happier and more content, researchers reported May 28 in the journal Child Development.

The smartphone training “successfully increased the frequency of infant-directed singing, especially in soothing contexts, and led to measurable improvements in infants’ general mood as reported by caregivers,” senior researcher Samuel Mehr, a senior lecturer in psychology at Auckland University in New Zealand, said in a news release.

Co-lead researcher Eun Cho, a postdoctoral researcher at the Yale Child Study Center, said crooning to babies comes easily to most folks.

“Singing is something that anyone can do, and most families are already doing,” she said in a news release. “We show that this simple practice can lead to real health benefits for babies.”

For the study, researchers recruited 110 parents of young infants in the U.S. and New Zealand for a 10-week trial.

Half the participants were given the smartphone music training. The program taught parents new songs, provided karaoke-style instructional videos and infant-friendly songbooks, and sent weekly newsletters offering ideas for incorporating music into daily routines.

Everyone responded to daily smartphone surveys for four weeks regarding infant mood, fussiness and time spent soothing. Parents also were asked about their own mood and how often they sang to their tots.

The training led parents to sing more often to their babies.

“When you ask parents to sing more and provide them with very basic tools to help them in that journey, it’s something that comes very naturally to them,” co-lead researcher Lidya Yurdum said in a news release. She’s a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Parents not only sang more frequently, but they chose to use music to calm fussy infants, results show.

“We didn’t say to parents, ‘We think you should sing to your baby when she’s fussy,’ but that’s what they did,” Mehr said

The results suggest that low-cost programs to promote singing to infants could help soothe babies and, as a result, prevent parents’ nerves from fraying, researchers said.

“We don’t always need to be focusing on expensive, complicated interventions when there are others that are just as effective and easy to adopt,” Yurdum said.

Researchers now are conducting two follow-up studies, including one with professional-quality music training for parents and another that will last for eight months.

More information

The National Association for the Education of Young Children has more on singing to babies.

SOURCES: Yale School of Medicine, news release, May 28, 2025; Society for Research in Child Development, news release, May 28, 2025

Source: HealthDay