Doing nothing is not neutral
A new study from Spain has a result I find hard to forget: the wellbeing of children who did nothing got worse.
The study, published this year in Psychology of Music by Claudia Fernández de Cañete García, Pastora Martínez Castilla and Graham Welch, set out to test what extracurricular music and language lessons do for children’s wellbeing. It was a randomised controlled trial, the strongest design there is for asking whether something causes an effect. Seventy Year 4 children in Málaga, all from middle-income families, were randomly placed in groups: individual piano lessons, group instrumental lessons (percussion and singing), individual English, group English, or no extra activity. Those with lessons had 24 free weekly sessions over nearly seven months, all taught by the same teacher.
Group music lessons significantly improved the children’s psychological wellbeing, measured as self-acceptance, a sense of purpose and positive relationships, and they helped most the children who started with lower scores. The children given no activity showed a significant decline in psychological wellbeing over the same period, a fall not seen in any of the music or English groups. Life satisfaction and positive and negative feelings did not change significantly in any group.
We should be careful about what this proves. It is a small study of children from comfortable homes in southern Spain, and the children reported their own feelings. The group music children also started with lower wellbeing scores than the others, which may have given them more room to improve. It is an encouraging pointer, not proof that the same would happen in a village school in Oxfordshire or Gloucestershire.
But it fits what we see. Group teaching is how most of our music work happens: whole classes singing, opera workshops with Oxford Opera, Longborough Festival Opera and the Academy of Barmy Composers, large choral events with Caius Lee, Director of Music at Worcester College, and in several schools a weekly specialist music teacher. One teacher can reach thirty children at once, which matters when money is short and when many families could never pay for individual lessons. The Málaga trial suggests that teaching music in groups is not a cheap second best to one-to-one lessons. For wellbeing, it may be the better choice.
The other half of the finding deserves as much attention. We cannot say why the no-activity children declined, and it would be wrong to read too much into one study. But it is a reminder that a child with nothing structured and enjoyable to do is not standing still. If we want children to feel they matter, that they belong and that there is something worth working towards, singing and playing together is a good place to start.
Much of the concern about screens, social media and gaming comes from the same place. People are social animals: we need to interact and to engage. Excessive use of screens can crowd out that interaction, and people may become isolated and lonely, with consequences for their mental health. Learning in groups is a positive social experience. UNESCO’s 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report found little robust evidence that digital technology adds value in education. Some of it can improve some types of learning in some contexts, but it should complement face-to-face interaction with teachers, not substitute for it. Educational technology can be useful, but not to the exclusion of group learning.
There comes a point where, to advance further as an artist or a musician, a great deal of time may be needed alone to practise, refine and upskill in order to communicate better. The crucial thing is that the purpose of the time alone is to communicate better: there is a viewer, a listener, another person wanting to share your experience and understanding. Being able to communicate and empathise is likely to improve the wellbeing of both parties. Lacking that experience, as an artist or as an audience, is to go backwards in life, to shrivel up. Doing nothing has negative consequences: it is rarely neutral.
