How can music help new parents and expecting families?
Meet Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project.
A longstanding partner to The Global Leaders Institute, four 2024 GLI fellows are applying core course frameworks to explore The Lullaby Project — collectively developing a first-hand Case Study Assignment as a component of their MBA learning journey. This project is one of a range of real-world challenges for GLI Fellows to expand their hands-on perspectives through the classroom network, investigating the world of innovative arts initiatives like the Lullaby Project.
The Lullaby Project has paired new and expecting families with professional musicians to write and sing personal lullabies for their babies for over a decade. This collaborative experience invites parents to write letters to their babies. The letter is a creative collaboration icebreaker that prompts parents to create through imagination: “Imagine your baby in the future, as a young adult. Your child finds a letter you wrote about your hopes and dreams for them. Imagine your child keeps this letter for inspiration and guidance through life. What would your letter say?”
As the core feelings of the piece unfold, musicians help parents turn their words into music, exposing expecting parents to the process of artistic creation and celebrating their creativity along the way. This way, the parents can have their songs sung back to them. Alexis, a mother and Lullaby Project Participant in New York City, reflects on how impactful this experience was:
“Through that process, hearing Nico’s Lullaby sung back to me, I realized for the first time that his song was also a song for me. The lyrics of “Song for Nico” echo, “I Trust You.” This process allowed me to find the words to share with Nico, but even more so with myself. A deep trust in the journey of parenthood, growing and creating.”
Lullaby Project invites select parents yearly to perform and record their songs on a Carnegie Hall stage. This moment exhibits a collective tapestry of creativity that allows participants and surrounding communities to enjoy pieces of hope, dreams, and love, but also with the added condiments of personal life: storytelling, family history, imagined futures, and overall sharing of culture and language. Hundreds of these lullabies are on the Carnegie Hall Lullaby Project Soundcloud site. The initiative recently celebrated 12 years of service and over 3000 lullabies written.
Today, the Lullaby Project enables partner organizations to support families across their communities in healthcare settings, schools, foster care, homeless shelters, correctional facilities, high schools, refugee camps, and other sites.
A Project With Astounding Flexibility
Lullaby Projects can happen anywhere. They are light and portable since they source outputs from local families and musicians. All that is needed is an adequate place to work. In New York City alone, Lullaby Projects have existed in public hospitals, foster care and alternative school programs, and correctional facilities, to name a few.
The most significant potential of this project is to reorient to a wide range of social challenges through this artistry-activating activity. Returning to New York City’s example, no specific parenting moment is required to participate in the project. The project can address pregnant mothers, parents with newly born children, and longstanding parents. The project, of course, can also go beyond parents.
What started as a New York City-based initiative in partnership with Jacobi Medical Center (South Bronx) now includes over 50 partner organizations in countries such as Chile, Peru, Colombia, Canada, Cyprus, Greece, France, Spain, Portugal, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, among others.
The challenge ahead: encouraging the continuation of evaluation of this social problem
The guiding principle of this US initiative is that activating artistry in families offers children a chance at proper development in the first three years of their lives, a crucial time in which 85% of brain development happens. Carnegie Hall partners regularly with Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf to deepen the findings of music’s importance in human evolution:
“Early childhood—from birth to age five—is a remarkable period in human development. At one year old, a baby’s brain is 70 percent of its adult size; at three years, it has reached 85 percent, crisscrossed by the connections that provide for human thought and communication. Live music—and the human interaction accompanying it—is one of the most intense, multisensory, and physically involving activities in which young children and their caregivers can engage. (…) These early years are also when children learn how to express and manage their feelings and figure out how to read other people’s expressions and feelings, grasping how other minds work. Through music, children can invent games, songs, and stories that help them harness their feelings. Researchers observing music and movement classes have documented that participation in arts activities correlates with positive feelings for preschoolers and facilitates their ability to regulate their emotions. It may be that experience with musical concepts like stopping/starting, slowing down / speeding up, and verse/chorus motivate children to direct and modulate their behavior.”
Source: wolfBrown.com
For this to happen, families must experience a healthy pregnancy and a safe and secure scenario for them to develop and thrive. With these conditions, music offers unlimited opportunities for building intimacy, trust, and well-being in families.
At the start of the Lullaby Project, Carnegie Hall leaned on the State of the World’s Mothers Report (SOWM) published yearly by Save the Children to learn the dimension of this social problem in the US. The report covers a range of maternal health outcomes and ranks countries in the measures they invest in to secure the well-being of their mothers. In 2015, the US ranked 146th out of 179 countries in the SOWM report, showing that the US currently fails to make necessary investments in young families. This evaluation initiative, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Johnston & Johnston, only lasted five editions, with its last edition printed in 2015.
Without the support of international organizations defining a standard of well-being and publishing hard evidence on the lack thereof in developed and underdeveloped countries, it is hard to grasp how impactful the Lullaby Project’s efforts are beyond the sentiment of its immediate beneficiaries.
Evaluation today relies heavily on Martin Seligman’s PERMA model, which conceptualizes the main factors contributing to well-being into five building blocks: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment.
Carnegie Hall performs interviews with parents before and after their participation in the project to measure their self-perception of well-being during the songwriting sessions. Dr. Palmer Wolf analyzes the sentiment of the mothers’ statements in and out of the project, noting a stark contrast with the agency-building songwriting activity and the overwhelming reality of a world they feel they cannot change. These statements are then quantified in Mean Frequency Values that show this drastic jump from no enunciations of well-being to many positive emotions and outlooks.
Source: “Lullaby: Being Together & Being Well.”
While this evaluation effort is a testament to music’s power during its therapeutic application, it does not address how these families learn to thrive through music’s power alone. While it is wise to avoid making such bold correlations, Carnegie Hall faces the challenge of persuading political leaders, policymakers, international aid organizations, and NGOs to sustain these measurement efforts in hopes of understanding its progress in New York City and beyond. Music’s soft power and long-term effects on families remain obscure without hard facts.
Carnegie Hall has stated how important research and evaluation are to the Lullaby Project and has agreed to have annual convening meetings every June to communicate new findings to partners and prospective partners. It is also in June when Lullaby Project hosts its annual celebration concert.
The GLI Case Study Team
Janelle Davidson (Panama)
Juan Pablo Aschner (Colombia)
Rachel Watson (USA)
Shanna Lin (USA)
Sources
https://www.carnegiehall.org/Education/Programs/Lullaby-Project
https://www.carnegiehall.org/Explore/Articles/2020/12/09/Why-Making-Music-Matters
https://www.savethechildren.org/content/dam/usa/reports/advocacy/sowm/sowm-2015.pdf
