How young could a child start learning an instrument?

Question

I play the guitar and have always tried to include my son in the fun when I play. He's 9 months old and seems to always like listening to it so far. Recently he has become very curious about the guitar itself. I've let him play with it and I've watched him carefully pluck the strings and get a real kick out of making noise with it.

The guitar is expensive and so playing with it comes with a lot of "No no, son. Be careful. Try like this" and other kind of negative attention. So I'm wondering if anyone has any insight or advice on letting him explore playing with an instrument.

What might be a good first instrument for a young kid? Should I even try to give him his own thing to play with at this point or is 9 months old just too young? I just think it would be a lot of fun to play around and show him and then be able to let him have fun with it without worrying about breaking it.

Answer 1

here are some things you can do with a child of any age that doesn't even require and instrument.

• Sing to the child
• make up call and response "songs" (for a slightly older child)
• clap along to music (if the child is too young for this take their hands and clap them along to the beat)
• dance
• just listen to good music
• go see live musicians play (expose them to different instruments than you have at home, and gets them to see how different instruments work together)

As the child gets older instruments can be introduced. durability of the instrument can go down as cost of the instrument and age of the child goes up

• very young kid: shakers, pots and pans, other percussion instruments
• slightly older: toy piano/keyboard, ukulele, recorder
• older: piano/guitar, OR whatever they are interested in. I always thought that the instruments I wanted to play chose me....or I was born with it. Follow the kid's lead.

Answer 2

As you'll be well aware, safety is the first consideration - e.g. a young child could easily pull a guitar string in the way that it would snap - you don't want early experiences of the instrument to include receiving some kind of facial laceration! Similar considerations with electric instruments. Of course with appropriate caution (for the sake of the instrument, as well as the child!) there is probably no harm in gently showing a young child what the instrument is about.

Beyond that, there are toy versions of most instruments available that will have been safety-tested to standards appropriate to different age ratings - keyboards, drums, shakers, xylophones, and various wind instruments will all be available (and even if age-rated slightly older, may be better than grown-up instruments for semi-supervised play - but careful of things like rubber buttons on keyboards that might get pulled off). There's probably no harm in slowly introducing some of each (unless the toy in question makes a noise that you find extremely irritating, of course!)

At 9 months, a child is still working out the basic physics of the world, and the way what they do with their body affects the objects around them (and vice versa) - so at that age it's probably best to just see any instruments as part of that general learning experience.

I fully agree with b3ko (whose list is good) that happy listening experiences are likely to be as important in very early years as direct exposure to instruments.

Answer 3

I'll describe the approach I took, and you can see if any of these activities appeal to you.

Kindermusik worked really well for one of my children when he was a toddler. I still sometimes sing, "Toast, toast, I like it a lot"!

For both of my children I kept a box of safe instruments for them and their friends to play. The sunshine drum, a tambourine, some jingle bells shaped in a circle, a wood block, a one-octave xylophone. I took the batteries out of their toys because the tinny electronic sound got on my nerves. I did not include anything in the instrument play box that had an annoying sound, or they could damage, or that could harm them. When playmates came over, they would each choose an instrument and then make a parade with "music."

We had some good children's songbooks, and we cycled them through the bedtime reading, and sometimes sang from them during the day as well.

I took them to children's concerts, orchestra concerts, puppet shows for their age range (which often included music), ballet and other dance performances.

I made sure that all their musical experiences were positive -- so I didn't take them to highbrow concerts where they might have gotten on people's nerves, or they might have been uncomfortable. At the ballet, we sat next to an outside aisle to be able to make a quick exit if necessary. I made sure they had had plenty of exercise before we went, and I had them run up and down the aisle, or go up and down the stairs, during the intermission.

I would get permission to take them to dress rehearsals of dance performances that didn't include a matinee performance, because that way they didn't have to stay up until 10 or 11.

For my first child, the first instrument was the recorder. For my second child, the first instrument was the viola (it was actually a very small violin, strung like a viola). The recorder teacher was from Austria, and had many years of experience teaching recorder to children. The viola teacher was a Suzuki teacher, and teacher trainer.

My younger son LOVED to dance. Even at the age of two, he would work out his choreography, and then sit us all down to watch. His favorite music to dance to was Tito Puente. He was given a toy DJ sort of thing, where he could get different drum-like sounds by hitting different areas. That was pretty much the only toy he could play with by himself (without interaction with another person). He liked to play his brother's drumset from age two. He couldn't do much harm, because it was a hand-me-down from a hand-me-down.

I never allowed my children to experiment with my cello. I just wasn't comfortable with that.