Parents usually enroll their children in music lessons for one simple reason.
They want their child to learn music.
They hope music will become a source of enjoyment, creativity, and personal growth.
But over the past thirty years, researchers have asked another important question:
Does learning music help children develop abilities that extend beyond music itself?
The answer appears to be yes, although perhaps not in the dramatic ways early headlines suggested.
The Mozart Effect: What We Learned
In the early 1990s, a famous study reported that college students briefly performed better on certain spatial reasoning tasks after listening to Mozart.
The media quickly transformed that finding into a much larger claim: that simply listening to classical music could make people smarter.
That wasn’t what the researchers had concluded.
Later studies showed that the so-called “Mozart Effect” was limited and often overstated.
But the excitement surrounding that research inspired a much better question:
What happens when children don’t simply listen to music, but actually learn to play it?
For more than three decades, psychologists, neuroscientists, and music educators have been studying that question.
Music Challenges the Brain in Remarkable Ways
Learning a musical instrument is one of the most complex activities many children will experience.
A young guitarist must simultaneously:
- Coordinate both hands independently.
- Read musical notation.
- Listen critically.
- Recognize patterns.
- Plan movements before they occur.
- Monitor rhythm and timing.
- Remember long sequences.
- Express emotion through sound.
Few childhood activities ask so many different systems of the brain to work together at once.
Researchers believe that this complexity helps explain why music training is associated with a variety of cognitive benefits.
What the Research Suggests
Although no single study can answer every question, decades of research point in remarkably similar directions.
Executive Function
Executive functions are the brain’s management system.
They include working memory, attention control, cognitive flexibility, planning, and self-regulation.
A large systematic review by Mehr and colleagues found that children engaged in music training often perform better on many of these executive function tasks than children without comparable musical experience.
These are the same skills children rely on every day in school.
Memory and Language
Music and language share many underlying brain processes.
Researchers Ho, Cheung, and Chan found that children with sustained music training demonstrated stronger verbal memory than children without music instruction.
Remembering melodies, rhythms, and musical patterns appears to strengthen many of the same systems involved in language learning.
Academic Learning
In one of the best-known studies in the field, psychologist E. Glenn Schellenberg reported that children receiving music lessons showed modest improvements on standardized cognitive measures compared with control groups.
Subsequent research suggests that music is unlikely to produce dramatic increases in IQ by itself.
Instead, it appears to strengthen attention, persistence, working memory, and other learning habits that contribute to academic success over time.
Does Music Raise IQ?
That’s probably the question parents ask most often.
The honest answer is:
Not in the simple way many newspaper headlines once suggested.
Today’s researchers generally view music as something more valuable.
Rather than magically increasing intelligence, sustained music study appears to develop many of the cognitive skills that help children become effective learners.
That’s an important distinction.
Music doesn’t replace education.
It becomes part of it.
Benefits That May Last a Lifetime
The value of music doesn’t end with childhood.
Research has also found that adults who continue playing musical instruments throughout life often maintain stronger cognitive function as they age.
A population-based twin study by Balbag and colleagues found that lifelong musical activity was associated with a lower risk of cognitive impairment and dementia.
Music cannot prevent dementia.
But many neuroscientists believe that complex musical activity helps build what is known as cognitive reserve, the brain’s ability to compensate for age-related changes.
Why This Matters
As encouraging as this research is, I don’t believe parents should enroll their children in music lessons simply because they hope to improve test scores.
Music deserves a much higher purpose than that.
Music teaches children patience.
Persistence.
Attention.
Self-discipline.
Creative expression.
It teaches them how to approach difficult work one small step at a time.
Those lessons often remain long after individual pieces have been forgotten.
The Bottom Line
If music lessons also improve memory, attention, executive function, and learning, that’s a wonderful bonus.
But the greatest gift of music is not a higher IQ.
It is helping children become thoughtful, disciplined, confident learners who discover the satisfaction of mastering something genuinely difficult.
The music itself is reason enough.
Everything else is an unexpected gift.
Selected Research
- Ho, Y. C., Cheung, M. C., & Chan, A. S. (2003). Music training improves verbal but not visual memory: Cross-sectional and longitudinal explorations in children.
- Schellenberg, E. G. (2004). Music lessons enhance IQ.
- Balbag, M. A., Pedersen, N. L., & Gatz, M. (2014). Playing a musical instrument as a protective factor against dementia and cognitive impairment.
- Mehr, S. A., Schachner, A., Katz, R. C., & Spelke, E. S. (2013). Research examining music training and executive function in childhood, along with later systematic reviews that evaluate the broader evidence.