Adopting a Musical Approach started life as a songwriting project, but very quickly grew in to something much more than that.

Cat says: “AAMA was conceived as a project to explore how I could create music that could help adoptive, fostering, and special guardianship families, and in particular the children in those families who have experienced the care system. My day job is as a musician and singer, and I often work with people who have profound and multiple learning disabilities, using music to communicate and interact with them. Music is a powerful tool for connecting with people, and I wanted to take my experience of using music in a therapeutic way, and apply it to what I know about adoption and trauma.”

The starting point for this project was a theory called ‘Communicative Musicality’, which is the theory that the way we instinctively communicate to babies is inherently musical in nature. When an adult talks to a baby they will naturally use a sing-song voice, which you might know as ‘baby talk’; psychologists call this Infant-Directed Speech (IDS), and there have been a number of studies in to the musical features of this type of communication. As the project went on, Cat delved deeper into learning how music affects us; for example when our fight/flight system activates, certain muscles in the middle ear shut down so we hear sounds differently, and why Disney songs are great for keeping you calm!

In the AAMA book, Cat has set out all the things she’s learned in a way that’s easy to digest. Each chapter relates to one song on the CD, in the order that they appear on the album. Every chapter has a communication theme, and a social/emotional theme, to reflect how you can use the songs in different ways for different purposes. For example, chapter 1 (What a funny sandwich) has a communication theme of turn-taking, and a social/emotional theme of agency and choice.

As well as the background and theory behind the songs, each chapter also gives suggestions of other games, songs, and activities relating to the chapter themes. All in all there are over 200 activities, songs, and games that you can utilise to playfully and mindfully interact with your child.