“With my own voice I could encourage others to also join in”: music-making to strengthen the parent-child early interaction

Parenting support has become part of the Finnish family policy over the past two decades, one of the aims being to support parent-child interaction. In the wake of the pandemic, the need of family support for parenting has increased; furthermore, family support services, such as family training, have been cancelled or have only been offered via video recordings. Parenting support needs have been identified, understanding in terms of growing healthy children, parents' capabilities and resources need to be supported and the early child-parent interaction needs to be strengthened. A child’s first year is crucial to create a strong basis for the holistic development of human life and to develop, children need for safe early interaction and emotional experiences with their parents. Meanwhile, the new health and social services counties’ objectives include the aim to increase preventive services, the discussion on the role and importance of using creativity and arts to promote health and well-being has been growing. In this empirical, qualitative case study the focus was to examine how the interaction between the parents and the baby can be strengthened through music-making in a group context. The musical baby group was organised in collaboration with Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and the group met four times to make music together. The data for the study was collected through semi-structured interviews were made with the mothers and video observation from the actual music-making. The data analysis process was data-driven using thematic analysis method. The findings explicate that music-making can provide concrete tools for parent-baby interaction to increase the ability to communicate and regulate emotions. Furthermore, the findings indicate that music-making with parents and babies in a group context can increase the feeling of sense of belonging. Music-making enabled sharing experiences in a group where interaction happened on several levels reciprocally between mothers, babies, and the group leader.