Why Listening to Instrumental Music Matters for Your Child's Development
What the research says, and what I've seen in a lifetime with music
By Eleonor Bindman
As a concert pianist and teacher, I've spent my life with music. I've felt what it can do to an audience, to a classroom, to the mood and quality of attention in a space. And as a mother, I've watched that same power work on a more intimate scale: a toddler pausing mid-play and moving joyfully when a melody catches their ear. Or a fussy evening settling into calm when the right piece is heard.
I created Classical for Kids because I believe every child deserves a quality listening life. And I want to share the reasons behind this need which are now fully supported by science.
Music Shapes the Brain From the Very Beginning
One of the most striking studies I've encountered comes from the University of Washington's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. Researchers there found that when nine-month-old babies participated in musical play sessions built around waltz rhythms, their brains became better at processing not just musical patterns, but speech patterns too. It strengthened the babies' ability to detect and predict rhythm across everything they heard.
What’s remarkable about this finding is that the babieswere simply immersed in music, moving and listening with their caregivers beside them. That's it. Their brains responded by becoming more attuned to the patterns that underlie both music and language.
A 2025 scoping review published in Acta Paediatrica examined studies on music and cognitive development in children published from 2003 to September 2024. Of the 27 chosen, 23 reported positive effects on at least one area of cognition, with executive functioning, attention, and learning showing the strongest benefits; there is a growing body of evidence pointing in the same direction.
Listening, Not Just Playing, Matters
There's a common assumption that the benefits of music only come from learning to play an instrument or being in a choir. Not only is this not true, but a 2019 report from the Arts Education Data Project suggests that only 48% of students across the country participate in music education during the school day. The report also notes that 8% of students have NO access to music education during their school day –– that’s over 3.6 million students in over 8,000 schools reporting they have no access to music education!
Here's what I find especially encouraging for families: passive listening activates many of the same neural pathways. A 2016 study from the Behavioral Science Institute in the Netherlands found that people who listened to uplifting classical music (in this case, the first movement of Vivaldi's Spring) showed measurably higher creativity on divergent thinking tasks compared to those who worked in silence. Similar research shows that listening to music can help sustain focus for longer stretches than working without it.
These findings matter because they tell us something important: the act of listening itself is meaningful. When music fills a room, it creates a kind of invisible architecture for attention, imagination, calm and endurance. You don't need lessons or a practice schedule to give your child the gift of music. You just need to press play.
A Natural Companion to Daily Life
One thing I love about instrumental music is how naturally it fits into the rhythm of a family's day. It doesn't compete with conversation or demand all-consuming attention. It accompanies your world.
Research by Dr. Tiffany Field found that toddlers fell asleep 35 percent faster when background classical guitar music was played during naptime (1999). In 2023, a study was published in Pediatric Research showing that newborns experienced significantly less pain during routine medical procedures when classical lullaby music was played. The researchers described music as "an easy, reproducible, and inexpensive tool for pain relief," one that could be used even in low-resource settings.
Now that streaming has become so accessible, listening is as simple as turning on a playlist. More importantly, it points to something I've always felt to be true: music meets children where they are. During play, it sparks imagination. During transitions, it provides a gentle structure. At bedtime, it becomes a bridge to sleep.
Why Instrumental Music, Specifically?
People sometimes ask me why Classical for Kids focuses on music without words. It's a fair question, and it's one I feel strongly about.
For young children especially, whose language centers are still developing, instrumental music offers a rich sensory experience without the cognitive load of processing lyrics. Without words to direct the listener's attention, the brain is free to wander, to discern patterns, to feel, to make its own connections. A child listening to a Debussy prelude or a gentle jazz trio isn't being told what to think or feel. They're being invited into an experience that is entirely their own. It supports the kind of open-ended, imaginative engagement that child development experts consistently point to as essential for healthy growth.
Let me be clear: I am not saying that music with lyrics is bad for your child. Research in the Journal of Child Language, published by Cambridge University Press, suggests that the pitch stability introduced by singing can help infants better recognize phonetic sounds and tones. Not only that, but the study also found that babies from families with informal music interactions tended to be more interested in instrumental music in comparison to babies from families reporting low levels of musical engagements at home.
By using Classical for Kids in your homes, you’re welcoming new experiences for you and your child to make musical experiences that will benefit them both now and in their future.
The Screen Question
Parenting is hard, and screens are a reality of modern life. But the research on early screen exposure is worth knowing about, because it helps explain why something like instrumental music can be such a valuable alternative.
A landmark longitudinal study published in 2025 by researchers at the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR) and the National University of Singapore tracked children from infancy through their teenage years. They found that high screen exposure before age two was linked to accelerated maturation of certain brain networks, which sounds positive but actually meant those networks specialized too quickly, before they had developed the efficient connections needed for flexible thinking. The result, years later, was slower decision-making and increased anxiety in adolescence.
What stood out to me in this research was a secondary finding: parent-child interactive activities, things like reading together and listening to music together, helped counteract these effects. The antidote isn't removing every screen. It's adding something rich and human to the mix.
That's what Classical for Kids is designed to do. Not to replace anything, but to offer something beautiful that you can share with your child. Something that asks nothing of you except to press play.
What I Believe
I've spent my life with music. I've performed on stages around the world and taught students who are just beginning to discover what listening can be.
And what I believe, after all of that, is simple: every child deserves to grow up hearing beautiful music. Not as a lesson. Not as an obligation. As a gift.
The research tells us that this gift supports attention, creativity, emotional regulation, language development, and sleep. But the research can only measure what it can measure. What it can't quite capture is the look on a toddler's face when a happy piece is in the air. Or the wordless contemplation that settles a child when a calm piece is playing. And especially the way a child who has grown up listening carries that capacity for deep attention into everything they do.
That's what instrumental music gives. And it's available to every family, right now, for free.
Just press play.
Sources
Zhao, T. C., & Kuhl, P. K. (2016). Musical intervention enhances infants' neural processing of temporal structure in music and speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 5212–5217. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1603984113
Visee, J. G. J., Dudink, J., van Baar, A. L., Volk, A., Tataranno, M. L., & Parmentier, C. E. J. (2025). Music and Rhythm as Promising Tools to Assess and Improve Cognitive Development in Children: A Scoping Review. Acta paediatrica (Oslo, Norway : 1992), 114(10), 2430–2442. https://doi.org/10.1111/apa.70151
Morrison, R. B., McCormick, P., Shepherd, J. L., Cirillo, P (2022). National Arts Education Status Report 2019. Arts Education Data Project, Quadrant Research, State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education. https://artseddata.org/national_report_2019/
Ritter S.M., & Ferguson S. (2017). Happy creativity: Listening to happy music facilitates divergent thinking. PLoS ONE 12(9): e0182210. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0182210
Field, T. (1999). Music Enhances Sleep in Preschool Children. Early Child Development and Care, 150(1), 65–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/0300443991500106
Anbalagan, S., Velasquez, J. H., Staufert Gutierrez, D., Devagiri, S., Nieto, D., & Ankola, P. (2024). Music for pain relief of minor procedures in term neonates. Pediatric Research, 95(3), 679–683. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-023-02746-4
Franco, F., Suttora, C., Spinelli, M., Kozar, I., & Fasolo, M. (2022). Singing to infants matters: Early singing interactions affect musical preferences and facilitate vocabulary building. Journal of Child Language, 49(3), 552–577. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000921000167
Huang, P., Chan, S. Y., Zhou, K. X., Chuah, J., Manahan, A. M. A., Law, E. C. N., Shorey, S., Zhou, H. J., Fortier, M. V., Chong, Y. S., Meaney, M. J., & Tan, A. P. (2026). Neurobehavioural links from infant screen time to anxiety. EBioMedicine, 123, 106093. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ebiom.2025.106093