ARIA - Musical Play

Waiting room

Child-Led Musical Play

In our sessions, the music therapist engages musically with your child while the co-therapist works more directly with your child. This is an approach largely derived from Nordoff-Robbins music therapy. We also engage in a lot of free play, in the style of what Amelia Oldfield calls "musical conversations."

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Sometimes children immediately enthusiastically engage with music, and sometimes children need time to explore what can be possible in the space of music therapy. In such cases the co-therapist plays with your child, entering into imaginary play, dance, or sorting, for example, while the music therapist plays music in a mood and tempo determined by the rhythm and feeling of your child's play.

Two Different Kinds of Attention and Focus

A lot of the young children we see and work with are in a difficult situation. On the one hand, at home, in day care, in school, it is a constant struggle to get them to focus on what they need to do. Many approaches and services, such as the Quebec governmental program ICI (intervention comportementale intensive - in English, ABA), focus on the question of how to help children better integrate into the structured requirements of the familial and social world that they must be a part of. And yet, paradoxically, at the same time that we can describe many children as unable to focus on what they need to focus on in order to move through the world we live in together, it is also true that these children seem to be too focused on tasks that we do not understand, and that we have no access to. Often, the stakes seem higher than just "playing": children seem willing to risk everything to pursue a singular and inaccessible interest. This can be all the more frustrating since it often seems difficult or impossible to figure out what is at stake for the child in what they are doing.

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Jacob Barnett remembers, as a small child, spending hours sitting on the floor of his bedroom trying to understand the relationship between the light from the sun, the tree on the other side of the window, and the shadow cast by the tree on the floor of his room. Yet from the outside, he notes, it would have looked like he was sitting there vacantly staring into space (Barnett tells this story in a short interview that is included in the audiobook version of The Spark). There is often a conflict between a child's singular interests -- and the laser-like focus with which they pursue their interests -- and the attention that life and relationships demand. This conflict leads to a potentially tragic situation, since the only way for a child to go farther in their interests is to pursue them with others, yet it is precisely because of these interests that they are cut off from being able to pursue them with others.

Copy cactus next to piano keyboard

Diagram indicating there is a relationship between specific interests and fields of study

From A Field Guide to Earthlings by Ian Ford

Our Objective

Our objective, in engaging in child-led musical play, is to undo the idea that there is an unresolvable opposition between these two modes of attention, between these two modes of focus and concentration.

We often focus on one kind of attention -- the kind of attention that is lacking -- at the expense of this other kind of attention. For example, we say that professors have their heads in the clouds, because they are thinking of something else. The singular attention to something that is inaccessible from the outside appears as an obstacle to the other mode of attention, which allows people to attend to their surroundings and to the social and familial world they live in.

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In engaging in child-led musical play, we work to put the conditions into place so that a child can experience that it is possible to go farther in their own interests with others, than it is possible for them to go alone.

In many contexts, the emphasis is on helping children develop the focus and attention that are required to live with others in complex social situations. Our sessions can be thought of as a supplement to this. Through music, through imaginative play, or through shared sorting, we work to accompany your child so that they can go farther in their interests. There are things that a child cannot do alone -- just like there are things that all of us cannot do alone. A child who is interested in watching objects spin will need others' help and support to explore the full complexity of this interest, to move from tops and yoyos to models of solar systems and galaxies to the mathematics of centripetal and centrifugal forces.

Rather than thinking of a child's interests and attention as an obstacle to the interests and attention that are required to live with others, our gambit is that relationships to others can be, for the child, a way to go farther in their singular interests, and that these singular interests can open a path to engage in complex social relationships with others. From this perspective, children need both help learning how to fit into the rules and models necessary to live with others, and need help discovering, through play with others, that it is possible to explore their interests, to cultivate them and to go further in their specific mode of attention and focus, with others.

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