When should a child begin to train, and why the old fear was wrong
Most parents think lifting weights is dangerous for children. Twenty years of paediatric consensus disagree, and the reason has more to do with the nervous system than with muscle.
Issue 2
The Truth About How Music Lessons Improve Your Child's Mind
Will music lessons help turn your child into a math genius? Science says the 'Mozart Effect' is a myth. But don't quit the violin just yet! Discover how music actually rewires your child's brain and the crucial skills it does improve.
6 min read
It is 5:00 PM after a busy school day. You are likely sitting on a folding chair in a school hall or a church basement. Your child is standing on a stage, trying to play a violin. The sound they are producing is hesitant, maybe a bit screechy. You are tired, the lessons are expensive, and the practice sessions at home have become a nightly negotiation leaving everyone frustrated.
Yet you persist. You do it because you have bought into a pervasive cultural promise: The Mozart Effect. Originating from a misinterpreted study in the 1990s, this is the theory that listening to classical music - or learning to play it - can temporarily boost spatial-temporal reasoning and overall intelligence. You hope that by learning an instrument, your child is gaining intellectual skills to help them study other subjects, like math. It is a strategy to give them an educational advantage.
It is a seductive promise. But the idea that learning music improves math is outdated. Research tells a much more complex story. If you are funding music lessons to engineer a child with a higher IQ, you are chasing a ghost. The era of believing "music makes you smarter" generally is over.
However, you should absolutely continue the lessons. Not because they will create a math genius, but because they are the most effective tool for training a critical cognitive skill. What’s more, learning music will improve your child’s ability in one other crucially important academic area.
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