Resilience, music therapy, and human adaptation: nurturing young children and families

Achieving Behavioural Advancement through the Dynamic Maturation Model and the Assessment of Parent–Child Interactions in a Music Therapy Context

Using concise and valid assessment tools before embarking on therapy with clients not only provides key information on areas of concern, but it can also focus the ongoing therapy, giving a greater chance of positive outcomes. This article discusses the use of the Dynamic Maturational Model (DMM) and the Assessment of Parent–Child Interactions (APCI) as a framework for assessment with adoptive families in a music therapy service. It is proposed that using a Screening Family Formulation (SFF) as detailed through the DMM alongside the APCI can provide this secure foundation for assessment. It is proposed that the DMM promotes the use of the professional–parent relationships as a useful outline for the parent–child relationship alongside a thorough understanding of the issues faced by the family. In addition, the APCI enhances the assessment process by providing clinical and therapeutic evidence of areas of development for the family.

Music as a factor associated with emotional self-regulation: A study on its relationship to age during COVID-19 lockdown in Spain

The purpose of this research is to reveal the possible relational influence of age on frequency and form of music consumption, its use, and value as a factor associated with emotional self-regulation in pandemic contexts. With this objective, this study applied a transversal, descriptive and analytical design in a sample of 1377 Spaniards during the confinement of COVID-19 from March 14 to June 20, 2020. The results report that music has been an essential generalized support for living with isolation and a powerful instrument for emotional self-regulation and relief from loneliness. Although an increase of 56% in the daily use of music for self-regulation of emotions was detected, higher frequencies of consumption, mainly in solitude, and a better conception of this artistic expression are identified in the population over 51 years old. However, young people between 18 and 40 years old stood out in the use of music as a resource to alleviate loneliness. These results confirm that music seems to have arisen as one of the most used artistic expressions to cope with loneliness, to relate to the outside or as a tool to endure psychological and emotional states catalogued as negative such as anxiety, anguish and depression, among others. Likewise, they evidence its role in personal and social wellbeing in distant age ranges, and the relational influence of music and age in contexts of isolation and loneliness.

The Limits of Resilience and the Need for Resistance: Articulating the Role of Music Therapy With Young People Within a Shifting Trauma Paradigm

A broad sociocultural perspective defines trauma as the result of an event, a series of events, or a set of circumstances that is experienced as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening, with lasting impacts on an individual’s physical, social, emotional, or spiritual wellbeing. Contexts and practices that aim to be “trauma-informed” strive to attend to the complex impacts of trauma, integrating knowledge into policies and practices, and providing a sanctuary from harm. However, there is a body of critical and decolonial scholarship that challenges the ways in which “trauma-informed” practice prioritizes individualized interventions, reinscribes colonial power relations through its conceptualizations of safety, and obscures the role of systemic injustices. Within music therapy trauma scholarship, research has thus far pointed to the affordances of music in ameliorating symptoms of trauma, bypassing unavailable cognitive processes, and working from a strengths-based orientation. In critiquing the tendency of the dominant trauma paradigm to assign vulnerability and reinforce the individual’s responsibility to develop resilience through adversity, this conceptual analysis outlines potential alternatives within music therapy. Drawing on a case example from a research project with young people in school, I elucidate the ways in which music therapy can respond to power relations as they occur within and beyond “trauma-informed” spaces. I highlight two overarching potentials for music therapy within a shifting trauma paradigm: (1) as a site in which to reframe perceived risk by fostering young people’s resistance and building their political agency and (2) in challenging the assumption of “safe spaces” and instead moving toward practices of “structuring safety.”