Feelings

Part Five: The Emotional Life of the Toddler

Control of emotions is one of the most complex challenges facing toddlers and their parents. children vary greatly in the intensity of how they experience and express feelings, depending on inborn temperamental factors, but it is a rare toddler whose feelings do not become intense and overwhelming at times. As parents provide both limits and loving support to their toddler, they are helping the child gradually learn ways of handling and modulating their feelings so that the tantrums of the 2-year-old ideally give way to emphatic verbal argument of the pre-schooler.

Developing competence in language and increasingly complex symbolic play skills will help this process immensely. Music as a fundamental route for the expression of human emotion, is an excellent tool for helping young children learn to identify and channel emotions. Very young children can identify and channel emotions. Very young children can identify music that makes them happy or sad, and enter enthusiastically into singing songs, or even verses within the same song that express emotion. Learning to identify loving, contented feelings and feelings of anger, fear and sadness are equally important human tasks. Musical expression of these wide ranges of emotion can help make them more manageable, less overwhelming, and much more understandable to the child who language skills are still emerging.

It is clear that many of the elements that make up a Kindermusik class enhance a toddler's ability to progress in these crucial tasks. The structure of the Kindermusik program and the opportunities it offers have the potential to directly enhance each parents ability to support his or her child in these tasks, and thus increase th joy inherent in parenting a bright, musical toddler.