Laura Kates / Child Psychology and Music

Laura Kates (by the way she is an amazing drummer! ) Senior Project

Child Psychology and Music

My final project for jazz was to play four songs off of Francisco’s album “School of Enlightenment” for a first grade class and have them create pictures while they were listening to the songs. The four songs I played for the class were “Early Shift”, “Budejovica”, “Baron”, and “Tatui”. Before I played the first song I explained to the class that their job was to draw what the music made them feel like drawing, whether it was a duck or a squiggle or a design, or something the music reminded them of. I also made sure to mention that they shouldn’t pay attention to their neighbor or feel that they were wrong to draw what they chose to draw because they were the only one who thought of that particular thing. The following paper is an analysis of what I believe went on in these children’s heads while they were participating in this experiment.
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One of the most wonderful characteristics of young children is their invaluable ability to be brutally honest in any given situation. Teenagers and adults recognize the social stigma that can sometimes be equated with honesty, and they are therefore rarely as straightforward. For example, if a woman had a mole on her face, most people above the age of twelve would choose to ignore it. However, a child between the ages of two and eleven may feel compelled to ask a question or make a comment that society would generally view as inappropriate, such as “What’s that weird thing on your face?” This interesting psychosocial difference can be explained using Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development.

Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development

As you can see from this chart, Erikson divided human social development into eight stages; Infancy, Early Childhood, Preschool, School Age, Adolescence, Young Adulthood, Middle Adulthood, and Maturity. Each of these stages represent different periods of time during a human lifespan and – according to Erikson - in each of these stages a human deals with a different social dilemma. Young children can be placed in the categories of Early Childhood, Preschool, and School Age, but the children I dealt with during this informal experiment were in the first grade, putting them in the School Age group. School Age youngsters are dealing with the “Industry vs. Inferiority” stage of their life. This predicament indicates that a child in this age group is being faced with new challenges, both socially and academically. If he is successful in dealing with these challenges he feels a sense of competence, or “industry”. If he struggles, he feels that he is incompetent, or “inferior”. Examples of academic challenges may be tasks such as writing his name, completing mathematical equations, or spelling a word correctly. Examples of social challenges may be making new friends, dealing with bullying, or pleasing authority figures, such as his parents or his teachers. The desire for social competence is a perfect explanation of why children this age are so prone to succumbing to peer pressure; it’s a psychological necessity to fit in.
First graders are additionally interesting because they are in fact in a transition stage between Preschool and School Age. This means that although they are dealing with “Industry vs. Inferiority” they are also dealing with “Initiative vs. Guilt”, a quandary that explains the brutal honesty of youngsters that I touched on earlier. “Initiative vs. Guilt” denotes that a child, typically between the ages of three and five, feels the need to be in control of his environment. He feels that one way he can achieve this is to speak his mind and convince those around him that he is right. However, if he tries to exert too much power he may be reprimanded, causing him to have a sense of guilt. In the example of a child making a comment about a woman’s mole, the child’s mother may have taken him aside and yelled at him for being rude, causing him to feel guilty for taking too much initiative. “Initiative vs. Guilt” is also known as the stage where children typically learn right from wrong.

Early Shift
Ratio of obscure designs to specific images: 4:8

Many of the specific images produced used the color blue, which may have come Gretchen’s constant mention of “rain”. However, interestingly enough, none of the children actually drew anything having to do with rain, meaning that they were not consciously paying attention to the lyrics of the song. In one picture there is a blue girl, surrounded by musical notes, standing in front of what appears to be a purple sky. In the top right-hand corner of the paper, the child drew a smiley face. Another picture was simply a huge yellow smiley face surrounded by stars. The child who drew this picture was sitting next to the child who drew the picture of the blue girl; here is an example of “Industry vs. Inferiority”. The child saw that the other had drawn a smiley face, and thus he felt the necessity to draw the same image.


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Budejovica
Ratio of obscure designs to specific images: 5:7

Interestingly, all of the specific images created during this song included elements of nature. One was a picture of a whale in the ocean, another was a boat sitting in the water, and the rest were of various trees and flowers. Many of the obscure designs incorporated dots.

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Baron
Ratio of obscure images to specific designs: 2:10

Smiley faces were a common occurrence in these pictures, as were rainbows. One little girl drew an elephant; before doing so she looked at me and started giggling, and proceeded to say, “This song sounds like an elephant!” (Here is an example of Initiative). An interesting incident that occurred during this song was the creation of two almost identical pictures by two children who were sitting on entirely opposite sides of the room:


Tatui
Ratio of obscure images to specific designs: 4:8

One picture that was very interesting to me was a picture that seemed as if the child had remembered an experience he had while listening to this song. The image is of three people on a camping trip staring up into the night sky, exclaiming while they stare at the stars. This picture was entirely unlike any of the other pictures created while this song was playing, showing that perhaps this youngster was actually venturing ahead into the next cycle of Social Development, called “Identity vs. Role Confusion”. The originality of this picture showed that he was able to stay true to himself and disregard the pictures around him.

It was during this song that I also experienced another example of Initiative. One little boy, in the middle of the song, grumbled, “Why do all of these songs sound the same?”
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This experiment was an excellent way for me to learn more about psychosocial development in children. It was also very interesting to witness the different ways each of these first graders responded to jazz music in place of the music they normally listen to, such as pop or rock. A few things I’m still wondering about are why did that one kid think that all the songs sounded the same and how was it that two kids – sitting on completely opposite sides of the room – drew nearly the same picture (?!)