Practical and psychological support for parents and children

Week 4: When Words Aren’t Enough

Using Music to Support Emotional Regulation

Sometimes children cannot tell us what they are feeling. Music can offer another way to connect, communicate and regulate.

As parents, we often reach for words when our children are struggling. We ask what is wrong, encourage them to tell us how they feel, reassure them, or try to talk them through what has happened. For many children this can be helpful, particularly once they are calm enough to reflect upon their experience.

But what happens when words are not available?

For some autistic children, children with ADHD, learning disabilities or communication differences, spoken language may not always provide the most accessible route into emotional regulation. Some children are non-speaking; others may use AAC or communicate through gesture, movement, facial expression or behaviour. A child who usually communicates verbally may also find language considerably harder to access when they are emotionally or sensory overwhelmed.

As we considered last week, behaviour can tell us something about what a child is experiencing when they cannot tell us themselves. Perhaps the next part of that conversation is to consider how we can respond without always relying upon words.

Music offers one particularly interesting possibility.

Music has long been part of the way human beings connect, communicate and experience emotion. We sing to babies before they understand language. We instinctively rock and soothe children rhythmically. Songs accompany play, routines and transitions, and many of us turn to music throughout our lives when we need comfort, energy, expression or connection.

There are good psychological reasons for this. Music is not processed as a purely auditory experience. It engages distributed neural systems associated with emotion, reward, memory, attention and movement, giving it a particularly interesting relationship with our emotional experiences (Koelsch, 2014).

For children who struggle to explain what is happening inside them, this matters. Music does not necessarily require a child to first identify an emotion, find the correct word and communicate it to somebody else. It gives us another possible way of reaching emotional experience — through rhythm, sound, repetition, movement and relationship.

Music, the Body and Regulation

Emotional regulation is sometimes described rather simply as the ability to “calm down”, but regulation is much broader than this. It involves recognising and managing changes in emotional and physiological arousal so that we can remain engaged with ourselves, other people and our environment.

For children, this capacity develops gradually and is supported through relationships and repeated experiences of co-regulation with trusted adults (Paley and Hajal, 2022). For neurodivergent children, regulation can be particularly complex because emotional experiences may interact with sensory processing, communication, attention, executive functioning and the demands of the surrounding environment.

Music is valuable here partly because it can work with the child at the level of the body as well as the mind.

Think about what happens when we hear music ourselves. A strong rhythm may make us want to move. A familiar song can bring an immediate sense of recognition. Certain music can energise us, while other music may help us slow down. A song associated with an experience can evoke an emotional response before we have consciously thought about the memory attached to it.

Research into music-evoked emotion demonstrates that musical experiences involve neural systems associated with emotion and reward as well as auditory processing (Koelsch, 2014). This does not mean that we can select a particular piece of music and predict exactly what it will do to a child’s nervous system. Regulation is far too individual for that. It does, however, help explain why music can have genuine emotional significance rather than functioning merely as entertainment.

This distinction is particularly important when we think about children who are non-speaking or have significant learning or communication difficulties. We do not have to wait until a child can say “I feel anxious” before we begin supporting the experience of anxiety. Nor does a child need to understand the abstract concept of emotional regulation before experiencing something that helps their body feel more organised and manageable.

Sometimes the experience can come before the understanding.

Why Rhythm and Repetition Can Be So Valuable

One of music’s most useful qualities is its structure.

Rhythm creates pattern. Repetition creates familiarity. A known song has a beginning and an ending and, once it becomes familiar, the child can begin to anticipate what comes next.

For children who experience uncertainty as stressful, predictability can itself be supportive.

This may be particularly relevant for some autistic children, for whom sensory experiences, transitions and environmental demands can contribute significantly to emotional and behavioural functioning (Ashburner, Ziviani and Rodger, 2008). For children with ADHD, difficulties with inhibition and emotional regulation can make changes in arousal particularly challenging to manage (Bunford, Evans and Wymbs, 2015).

A familiar musical routine can therefore provide a form of structure without requiring lengthy verbal instruction.

We already do this intuitively with young children. We use songs for tidying up, getting ready, saying goodbye or preparing for sleep. The music does more than make the activity enjoyable; it can provide a recognisable cue that helps organise the experience.

For a child with additional needs, this can be developed sensitively around their individual preferences. A familiar song might support a transition. Rhythm might accompany movement when a child needs physical release. A repeated melody might become associated with settling for sleep or moving towards a quieter activity.

Research examining music therapy for autistic people provides some support for the wider therapeutic value of musical engagement. A Cochrane review involving 26 studies and 1,165 participants found moderate-certainty evidence for improvements in global outcomes and quality of life following music therapy, although evidence for specific verbal, non-verbal and social communication outcomes remained less certain (Geretsegger et al., 2022). 

This is an important distinction. Music should not be presented as a treatment that will somehow make autism disappear, nor should every musical activity at home be described as “music therapy”. Music therapy is a professional therapeutic discipline.

What the evidence does encourage us to consider, however, is the potential value of music as a medium through which some children can engage, express themselves and connect.

Regulation Does Not Always Look Calm

There is another assumption I think we need to challenge.

When we talk about emotional regulation, we can easily imagine a quiet child sitting peacefully while gentle music plays in the background.

For some children, that might be regulating.

For another child, it might be completely wrong.

Regulation does not necessarily mean becoming quiet or still. Sometimes a child needs movement before they can settle. A child with ADHD may benefit from an opportunity to move rhythmically, dance, jump or drum rather than being repeatedly instructed to sit still. An autistic child may enjoy the predictable repetition of one particular piece of music or rhythm. Another child may find music itself sensory overwhelming and need silence.

This is why I would be very cautious about phrases such as “calming music for autism” or “the best music for ADHD”.

There is no universally regulating piece of music because there is no universally identical neurodivergent child.

The value lies in understanding your child.

What music do they seek?

What rhythms seem to engage them?

Do they move towards music or away from it?

Does familiar music seem easier to tolerate than unfamiliar sound?

Do they enjoy singing, humming, tapping, rocking or moving?

And importantly, when do they tell us — verbally or otherwise — that they have had enough?

For a non-speaking child, turning away, covering their ears, changing their movement, pushing something away or becoming distressed is communication. Supporting regulation means respecting that communication just as we would respect the spoken words “Please stop.”

Music should therefore be an invitation, never an imposition.

Music as Co-Regulation and Connection

Perhaps the aspect of music I find most powerful is that it does not have to be something we do to children.

It can be something we experience with them.

Emotional regulation develops within relationships. Co-regulation describes the process through which adults provide responsive emotional and environmental support while children’s own regulatory capacities are developing (Paley and Hajal, 2022).

Music can sit beautifully within that process because it allows connection without demanding conversation.

A parent humming alongside a child does not require an answer.

Tapping a rhythm together does not require eye contact.

Moving to a familiar song does not require the child to explain how they feel.

A child who communicates without speech can still initiate, respond, anticipate, choose, reject and participate in a shared musical experience.

This can be particularly valuable because it shifts our focus away from what a child cannot do and towards the many ways in which they already communicate and connect.

And sometimes that shared musical experience is enough.

We do not always need to turn it into a lesson about feelings. We do not necessarily need to ask afterwards, “Are you calm now?” or “What emotion were you feeling?”

Sometimes the therapeutic value lies simply in the experience of being alongside someone who understands how to join our world without demanding that we first explain it.

Where Melody Fits Into This Thinking

It is perhaps unsurprising that these ideas have influenced my own thinking about how we introduce emotional regulation to young children.

I have often reflected on the difficulty we create when we ask children to explain emotions they do not yet understand. This becomes even more significant when a child has communication or learning difficulties, or experiences their emotional and sensory world differently.

It was from these reflections that the idea of Melody the Musical Note gradually developed.

Melody is a little musical note who appears when children are experiencing feelings that have become difficult to understand or manage. Through simple songs, rhythm and movement, she helps them begin to notice what is happening in their bodies and discover gentle ways of responding to those feelings.

The idea is not that music makes difficult emotions disappear.

Quite the opposite.

It is about helping children learn that emotions can be noticed, experienced and gradually regulated — and recognising that this learning does not always have to begin with words.

For me, Melody has become another way of exploring a principle that sits at the heart of this whole series: we need to meet children where they are, rather than continually asking them to meet us where we expect them to be.

Music is one possible way of doing that.

Next week, we will broaden this conversation further and consider another language children can use when words are difficult — creativity and art.

A Gentle Reflection

Perhaps this week, simply notice the place music already occupies in your child’s life.

You do not need specialist equipment or musical ability. You do not need to become your child’s music therapist. And you certainly do not need to introduce music simply because somebody has told you it is good for regulation.

Instead, observe.

Notice what your child seeks, enjoys and responds to.

Perhaps there is a song they return to repeatedly. Perhaps rhythm encourages movement when their body needs movement. Perhaps humming together provides connection. Perhaps music makes transitions easier. Or perhaps your child tells you very clearly that what they need is quiet.

All of those responses matter.

Because supporting regulation is not about collecting more and more strategies and applying them to children.

It is about understanding the individual child in front of us.

And when words are difficult, music can sometimes give us another way to listen, another way to connect and another way to help a child discover what regulation feels like in their own body.

Sometimes we do not need children to find the words before we begin to reach them.

Sometimes we simply need to find another language.

And for some children, that language may be music.

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References

Ashburner, J., Ziviani, J. and Rodger, S. (2008) ‘Sensory processing and classroom emotional, behavioural, and educational outcomes in children with autism spectrum disorder’, American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 62(5), pp. 564–573.

Bunford, N., Evans, S.W. and Wymbs, F. (2015) ‘ADHD and emotion dysregulation among children and adolescents’, Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 18(3), pp. 185–217.

Geretsegger, M., Fusar-Poli, L., Elefant, C., Mössler, K.A., Vitale, G. and Gold, C. (2022) ‘Music therapy for autistic people’, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 5, CD004381.

Koelsch, S. (2014) ‘Brain correlates of music-evoked emotions’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15(3), pp. 170–180.

Paley, B. and Hajal, N.J. (2022) ‘Conceptualizing emotion regulation and coregulation as family-level phenomena’, Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 25, pp. 19–43.