Stability of Music Engagement Across Childhood, Adolescence, and Established Adulthood: A Longitudinal Twin and Adoption Study

Music engagement traits are linked to important developmental language, cognitive, and mental health outcomes, but longitudinal studies have not examined the developmental stability of music engagement across the first few decades of life, especially using genetically informative designs. The current study examined music engagement-defined as being interested and skilled at musical instruments and taking music lessons-across four timepoints in childhood and adolescence to test the hypothesis that genetic influences explain an increasingly larger proportion of variance over time. We also examined how these measures relate to the frequency of music engagement and music listening in adulthood. Analyses were based on archival data from 1878 individuals in the Colorado Adoption/Twin Study of Lifespan behavioral development and cognitive aging (CATSLife), who completed self-reported measures of music engagement at ages 7, 10, 12, and 16 years, and two additional items in established adulthood (mean age 33 years). Results indicated that music engagement was moderately stable throughout childhood and adolescence (r = 0.20 to 0.49). Heritability was larger in males than in females, but only in childhood, with greater stability of shared environmental influences in female children. These measures were modestly correlated with the frequency of musical instrument playing in adulthood (r = 0.07 to 0.29) but not the frequency of music listening. These findings suggest that early music engagement is a dynamic phenotype that changes considerably between childhood, adolescence, and beyond. This work highlights the need for a developmental perspective in theoretical models of music engagement and its relation to language, cognition, and health.