Which kids end up taking music lessons, and why?
How long young children had taken music lessons was best predicted by how open to new experiences their parents were, not mainly by the child's intelligence.
Source
Predicting who takes music lessons: parent and child characteristics
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-time-point correlational study; child IQ tested, parents reported demographics, child personality and their own Big Five personality; hierarchical regression predicting cumulative months of music lessons.
- N
- N=170 · 170 children aged 7-9 with one parent reporting; 98 of them had any music training (income data missing for four).
- Population
- 7- to 9-year-old children and their parents from a middle-class Toronto community sample
- Outcome
- Cumulative months of extracurricular music lessons
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
The researchers tested 170 children aged 7 to 9 on a short IQ test and asked a parent to report family income, education, other activities, the child's personality and their own personality. They then used step-by-step regression to see which of these predicted how many months of music lessons the child had taken.
What they found
Longer training went with being older, higher family income, more parental education, more non-music activities, higher IQ, higher child openness and agreeableness and lower neuroticism. The strongest single correlation was with the parent's openness to experience (r = 0.30). In the final model, which explained 22.0% of the variance, age and parental openness were significant predictors, and the IQ link disappeared once personality was taken into account.
The limits
What it doesn't show
It is a one-time correlational study, so it cannot show that parental personality causes lesson-taking, and no genetic data were collected even though the interpretation is about gene-environment correlation. The same parent rated both their own and their child's personality, which could inflate the parent-child link. Lesson duration was reported retrospectively, the sample was middle-class and above-average in IQ, and the authors note that results may not apply outside Western lesson-based music cultures.
Key terms
- Gene-environment correlation
- The tendency for people's genetically influenced traits to shape the environments they experience, so environment and genes are not independent.
- Passive gene-environment correlation
- When parents, who share genes with their child, create the child's environment, such as enrolling them in lessons.
- Niche-picking
- The active form of gene-environment correlation, where older children seek out environments that fit their own traits.
- Openness to experience
- A Big Five personality trait involving curiosity, interest in the arts and ideas, and willingness to try new things.
- Hierarchical multiple regression
- A regression in which blocks of predictors are added in steps to see how much extra variance each block explains beyond the earlier ones.
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Quiz yourself
What was the strongest single correlate of how long children had taken music lessons?
Common questions
Does this mean music lessons don't make children smarter?
Not directly, but it shows that children who take lessons already differ in income, IQ and personality, so correlational studies linking lessons to ability can't assume the lessons caused the difference.
Why would the parent's personality matter more than the child's at this age?
At 7 to 9, parents mostly decide which activities children do, so a curious, arts-loving parent is more likely to sign them up; the authors expect the child's own traits to matter more as they get older.
Why did IQ stop predicting music lessons in the regression?
IQ overlapped with family income and personality, so once those were controlled it added little unique prediction.
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