Your little one is growing by leaps and bounds, perhaps turning heads with impressive counting or recitations of rhymes or the alphabet. On an absolute scale, your child appears to be on his way with mathematics and language. Your child is also growing by leaps and bounds musically, but scales, though typically associated with music, are not so absolute in music development. Grandma hears your little one count to ten or recite the alphabet and is duly impressed. She may not, however, know what to make of “Bah Bah Bah” as music development, no matter how precise. She might be more impressed if your little one would point out quarter notes and eighth notes, show her where G is on the staff or piano, or make it through a song with a lot of words, but none of those are real indications of music learning. Sure, a toddler can learn to recognize quarter notes and eighth notes, C’s and G’s, impressing adults with traditional notions of music learning, but in music as with language, a child has to have a rich listening vocabulary and singing (speaking) vocabulary before symbols have any meaning. We can teach a toddler to recognize letters and numbers in a foreign language, but they have no meaning unless the child understands the language. We are simply labeling symbols. Similarly, recognizing quarter notes and eighth notes, C’s and G’s is not a musical skill, but simply “note naming.”
You may never get Grandma to understand the importance of your child’s deliberate “Bah Bah Bah” as music development, but make sure that the joy of your child’s newfound skills with numbers and letters does not diminish your own absolute scale for the wonder of your child’s musical competence, which may be expressed presently by the seemingly less impressive, “Bah Bah Bah.”
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