The study published in Child Development found that singing to infants can significantly boost their mood. This is according to researchers at Yale University’s Child Study Center, who conducted an experiment where parents were encouraged to sing more frequently to their babies. The results showed a measurable improvement in infants’ moods overall, compared to those in the control group.

The study included 110 parents and their babies, most of whom were under four months old. Parents were randomly assigned into two groups: one group received encouragement to sing more frequently by teaching them new songs, providing karaoke-style instructional videos, and sending weekly newsletters with ideas for incorporating music into daily routines. For four weeks, these parents received surveys on their smartphones at random times throughout the day.

The researchers found that parents were successfully able to increase the amount of time they spent singing to their babies. Not only did the parents sing more frequently, but they also chose to use music especially in one context: calming their infants when they were fussy.

“This simple practice can lead to real health benefits for babies,” said Eun Cho, postdoctoral researcher at the Yale Child Study Center and co-first author of the study. “We show that singing is something that anyone can do, and most families are already doing.”

The researchers believe that the benefits of singing may be even stronger than the current study shows, especially in a family that does not already rely on music as a way of soothing their infants.

A follow-up study, “Together We Grow,” will investigate the impact of infant-directed singing over an eight-month period. The Child Study Center researchers are currently enrolling parents and babies under four months old in this study to further explore the benefits of singing.

The findings have implications for alleviating stress or conditions such as postpartum depression in the long term, and may also show benefits beyond mood in infants, such as improved sleep.

As Samuel Mehr, an adjunct associate professor at the Child Study Center and director of The Music Lab, said, “Our understanding of the evolutionary functions of music points to a role of music in communication. Parents send babies a clear signal in their lullabies: I’m close by, I hear you, I’m looking out for you — so things can’t be all that bad.”

The bond between a child and their caregiver is the foundation upon which a lifetime of emotional and physical well-being is built. A new study published in JAMA Psychiatry has revealed that the warmth and affection shown by mothers to their children in early childhood can have a profound impact on their mental and physical health as they grow into teenagers.

Researchers from UCLA Health followed over 8,500 children as part of the Millennium Cohort Study in the United Kingdom. At age 3, independent evaluators assessed the mother’s warmth (praise, positive tone of voice) and harshness (physically restraining or grabbing the child). The same children were then asked about their perceptions of social safety at age 14. This included questions such as “Do I have family and friends who help me feel safe, secure, and happy?” At age 17, the participants reported on their overall physical health, psychiatric problems, and psychological distress.

The study found that maternal warmth at age 3 was strongly associated with more positive perceptions of social safety at age 14. This, in turn, predicted better physical and mental health outcomes at age 17. The researchers discovered that this relationship was not only significant but also influenced by the mother’s warmth rather than her harshness.

Dr. Jenna Alley, lead author of the study, explained that children who experience more maternal warmth tend to develop a positive view of the social world. This perspective is shaped by their early experiences and influences how they interpret, organize, and make predictions about social situations and relationships. In essence, a child’s “social safety schema” becomes their lens for viewing every interaction.

Dr. George Slavich, senior author of the study, noted that the findings have important implications for interventions and public health campaigns designed to enhance resilience across the lifespan. By focusing on enhancing a teenager’s sense of social safety, rather than just reducing perceptions of harshness, we can potentially have a positive impact on their health outcomes for years to come.

The study highlights the importance of early childhood experiences in shaping our perception of the world and ourselves. While it may not be possible to change past experiences, this research suggests that focusing on enhancing warmth and safety can greatly improve lives.

Additional studies are needed to determine how maternal warmth affects children in other contexts outside the United Kingdom and to explore ways in which healthcare providers and policymakers can use these findings to develop better interventions and public health campaigns.

The Pace of Aging, a newly refined method for measuring the rate at which individuals experience age-related health decline, offers researchers and policymakers a powerful tool for predicting risks associated with aging, including chronic illness, cognitive impairment, disability, and mortality. Developed by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health researchers, this approach quantifies how quickly individuals and populations experience age-related health decline.

The existing toolkit for population health research on aging did not distinguish differences caused by early-life factors from those caused by ongoing changes in people’s bodies due to aging. The findings from the study published in Nature Aging highlight the importance of this new method.

“Our Pace of Aging method is an essential approach for understanding population aging,” explained Arun Balachandran, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at the Columbia Aging Center and lead author of the study. “Our existing toolkit doesn’t include methods that can separate out the legacies of early life from the changes caused by aging.”

Daniel Belsky, PhD, associate professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School and member of the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center, elaborated on this point: “We developed the Pace of Aging method to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions targeting the biology of aging. The new approach introduced in this paper is designed to do the same for social policies and public health programs.”

The researchers analyzed data from two large-scale studies: the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA). These long-term studies follow adults aged 50 and older, along with their spouses, collecting detailed information on health, cognition, socioeconomic status, and family dynamics.

The new approach makes use of data from dried blood spots, physical exams, and performance tests given to participants in their homes at up to three timepoints over eight-year follow-up intervals. The researchers examined the Pace of Aging in 19,045 participants who contributed data over 2006-2016, with additional follow-up to determine disease, disability, and mortality through 2022.

In the US study, the Pace of Aging was measured from C-reactive protein (CRP), Cystatin-C, glycated hemoglobin (HbA1C), diastolic blood pressure, waist circumference, lung capacity (peak flow), balance, grip strength, and gait speed. The researchers found that their method can measure important variability in the pace of aging in older people with a relatively limited set of measurements.

“Our findings establish that we can measure important variability in the pace of aging in older people with a relatively limited set of measurements,” said Belsky. “Our findings open up possibilities to study pace of aging in cohorts around the world.”

The researchers also found signs of accelerated aging in people with lower levels of education and reported differences in aging trajectories across population subgroups. Originally developed using data from the Dunedin Study, a longitudinal study of individuals born in 1972-73, the initial Pace of Aging tool focused on changes from young adulthood through midlife.

The newly adapted method extends its utility to population-based studies of aging, offering planners and policymakers a valuable resource for monitoring and improving population health and longevity. “Beyond medicine and gerontology, this work has important implications for sociology and economics,” added Belsky.

“It can help us understand how life transitions – such as retirement, caregiving, and bereavement – affect the aging process and support the development of more effective public health and social policies.” The researchers highlighted that the differences in aging speed found were not just statistically significant but meaningful, with people aging faster much more likely to get sick, become disabled, or die sooner.

The study was supported by National Institutes of Health grants R01AG061378, T32AI114398, and U01AG009740; the Russel Sage Foundation; BioSS Grant 1810-08987; and the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center.