Abstract
Introduction: While we understand the potential benefits of mothers and fathers singing to their infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), the process is not simple. The challenges can be personal, contextual, and temporal. Singing is not a natural action for everyone. With rapidly increasing individualized music listening technology and decreasing opportunities for active music making in many countries, people have less experience and awareness of their own musicality. This can hinder their capacity to use music as part of nurturing their infant. Additionally, across their time in the NICU, parents can feel concerned about singing in a “public” place.
Main aims: This chapter outlines how the music therapist works in the real-world lived experience with parents. Three phases – anticipatory, cautious interplay, and active parenting – offer parents a different range of potential for their voice and the unfolding relationship with their infant.
Conclusion: The music therapist works with mothers and fathers to reconnect them to their own vocal potential and to normalize the sound of singing in the NICU. These processes are underpinned by theories of attachment and infant neurodevelopment and are responsive to the evolving needs of the mother and infant.
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Notes
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All names are changed. All quotes are drawn from the study reported in Shoemark, H. (2017).
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Shoemark, H. (2017). Empowering Parents in Singing to Hospitalized Infants: The Role of the Music Therapist. In: Filippa, M., Kuhn, P., Westrup, B. (eds) Early Vocal Contact and Preterm Infant Brain Development . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65077-7_12
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