My granddaughter lives on the other side of the world. She is still very young, too young to sing back, and on a video call there is not a great deal she can do with me. Conversation is out. Peekaboo works for about ninety seconds. The picture freezes.
But she knows the song. I start it, and before I am through the first line she is smiling and her hands have already begun the actions. I find it so delightful, and slightly humbling.
The song crosses the distance better than anything else does
Video calls with a baby are mostly a test of everyone’s patience. The lag makes ordinary back-and-forth impossible, because the timing that makes a conversation feel like a conversation is exactly what a poor connection destroys.
Songs do not seem to mind. They are the same every time. She is not responding to me in real time so much as recognising something she already has, and joining it from her end.
I had not expected repetition to be the useful part. I would have guessed that novelty was what held a small child’s attention. It turns out to be almost the opposite: the pleasure is in knowing what comes next, and getting to be right about it.
Which is probably why she does the actions before I sing the words. She is not following. She is showing me she knows.
I went looking for whether any of this was true
I tend to want to know if a thing I am enjoying is doing anything, which is possibly a character flaw.
Most of the research on singing and stress is about adults in choirs, which is not what I am doing at a kitchen bench at seven in the morning with a laptop propped on a cookbook. But some of it is interesting anyway.
Gunter Kreutz and colleagues, in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine in 2004, had an amateur choir sing at one rehearsal and listen to choral music at another, taking saliva samples both times. Singing lifted mood and raised an antibody found in saliva. Cortisol, the stress hormone everybody reaches for, did not fall. Listening did lower cortisol, and left people feeling slightly worse.
That is not the story I had absorbed. I had the version where singing rinses the stress out of you, and that is not quite what turned up.
Daisy Fancourt and colleagues at the Royal College of Music, working with Tenovus Cancer Care, measured 193 people across five choirs before and after an hour of singing and did find cortisol falling, with mood improving too. Everybody in that study sang, though, so there was no one to compare them against.
And a review led by Norma Daykin in Perspectives in Public Health found the overall direction consistent enough, distress down and wellbeing up during group singing, sitting on a lot of small studies with missing control groups. About two fifths of the evidence was rated moderate quality.
So: something happens. Nobody can tell you exactly what. And nobody has studied a grandmother singing an action song into a laptop at a baby miles away, which is the only study I would actually read.
What I think it is, offered as a suspicion
I do not think the singing is the point. I think the actions are.
She cannot talk to me yet. She cannot tell me about her day or answer a question or do any of the things that make a phone call a phone call. What she can do is anticipate. The song gives her something to be early for, and her hands give her a way to answer that does not need words or good bandwidth.
It is the only part of the call where she is doing something rather than being shown to me.
I suspect that is what I love about it, if I am honest. Not that it is sweet, though it is. That there is a thing we do together, rather than a thing I watch.
The distance does not go away
I would not want to tie this up too neatly. A song is not a substitute for being in the room, and I am aware that I am describing a workaround rather than a solution.
There are calls where she is tired and wants nothing to do with me. There are weeks where the time difference means I get her at her worst or not at all. Anyone doing this across continents knows the particular ache of watching a very small person change in fortnightly increments.
But she knows the song. Somewhere in a house I have never been in, that tune belongs to me, and when it starts she looks for my face.
If you are doing this too
Pick one song and stay with it. The temptation is to vary things, and I think that is the wrong instinct. The value seems to be in it being the same, so that a child too young for almost everything else can still be expert in this one thing.
Choose one with actions. The hands are what let her participate.
And do not worry about how you sound. You are, at this stage, the best singer she has ever heard.
What would you want a very small person on the other side of the world to know by heart?
I did not choose ours deliberately. It arrived by accident, the way most of the things that matter seem to, and now it is the one thing between us that the distance cannot get at.