The wonderful gift of a lullaby you’re giving to your grandchildren

When you sang lullabies to your children or grandchildren, you were doing something far more meaningful than just gently easing them in to the land of nod.

It turns out singing to babies is one of the best things adults can do for them, according to an interesting story in The New York Times, which says that infants are far more comforted by being sung to than they are by the same words delivered in a speaking voice, possibly because a song delivered by a loving adult such a powerful communicator that someone is looking out for them.

That why, one scientist says, when it comes to lullabies, it doesn’t matter if you’re not actually a good singer – it’s the emotional quality of the voice that comes across, not whether you’re hitting the right notes. Plus, babies quickly get used to the repetition of a song and the fact that similar events – being put to bed, lulled to sleep or kissed goodnight, for example, – almost always follow it, and that feeling of their expectations being met is both comforting and rewarding to them.

The author of the story, Paula Span, informally polled fellow grandparents to find out what they routinely sang to their small grandchildren and found, as the scientists said, no pattern or similarity to the songs that indicated some were better ‘soothers’ than others. It was the grandparents singing them that mattered.

Span’s first lullaby to her granddaugher was ‘Surfer Girl’ by the Beach Boys, while other grandparents reported singing everything from Beatles numbers to Dean Martin and Bob Marley, to ditties they’d learned from their own grandparents. ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour on the Bestpost Overnight’, the 1959  hit by Brit Lonnie Donegan, was one of the more unusual choices but it still worked!

None of the grandparents reported thinking hard about what to sing, saying the songs just popped into their heads.

But the scientists could explain why grandparents might find themselves remembering, and singing, songs they’d been rocked to sleep with as small children – when sung a lullaby for just a week at the age of five months, babies have been shown to remember that specific song as much as eight months later, showing that humans have a remarkable memory for meaningful songs and music.

What lullaby have you sung to your children or grandchildren? Was it a random popular tune, a classic lullaby or something your parents or grandparents sang to you?