Musical parenting and parents’ experiences in an early childhood music class

The purpose of this study is to explore how parents engage in musical parenting and how that parenting is shaped by enrolling in early childhood music classes. Three mothers who were attending an early childhood music class with their toddlers for the first time acted as participants. Participants enrolled in music classes through a partnership between the early childhood music programme and an early intervention organization. As a participant observer, I employed ethnographic techniques for data collection through observation of weekly music classes, visits to families’ homes, semi-structured interviews and collection of weekly journal entries from participants about music making in their home. Participants’ affiliation with the early intervention organization along with their beliefs about music participation and their personal music experiences motivated them to enrol in classes primarily with extramusical goals in mind. All the mothers in this study focused almost entirely on their child’s experiences in music class rather than their own. After participating in music class, parents easily identified shifts in their child’s musical behaviours at home but were sometimes hesitant to identify things that they learned or changes in their own behaviour. Despite this, parent learning and growth in music class contributed to changes in their musical parenting. Some of these shifts in parental musical engagement with their children were acknowledged by participants while other changes were unconscious and seemed to be the result of informal learning that took place during music class.