How Dance Develops In Children

Before they can walk or talk, children dance. Most children display dance-like movements—flapping their arms or swaying their torsos to music—before their first birthday. Now, researchers are taking advantage of this early dancing and using it to understand more about infants’ knowledge and brain development.   

A 2025 review in Current Directions in Psychological Science discusses how dance develops in early childhood and how studying the emergence of dance can reveal the development of auditory perception and musical memory. Dance can also promote social bonding with caregivers or peers and may help children with language delays or developmental needs.  

“There are now these pockets of researchers that are doing really cool work looking at how and when dance emerges and how that might be an indicator of knowledge about rhythm and song and other things,” Laura Cirelli, an author of the paper and assistant professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, said in an interview.  

Not only do infants dance more to familiar songs, they also move faster to faster music, revealing rhythm perception at a young age. In one study, Cirelli found that if a song’s melody or lyrics are changed, 20-month-old babies’ attention changes, whereas 11-month-old babies’ dance behavior changes. Although looking is the predominant way to measure infants’ recognition, in this case dance might be more sensitive.  

“Dance can be this tool to tell us about an infant’s knowledge,” said Cirelli. 

Why and how dance develops so early remains unknown. One idea is through the connections between auditory and motor areas of the brain. Perhaps as these connections are being formed—a crucial process for speech development—dance also develops.   

“Maybe dance just emerges because that’s how our brains work,” said Cirelli.  

When adults listen to music, motor systems track the beat and help make predictions about the timing of the next beat.  

“Even as babies, if we hear music with a rhythm, our motor systems are going to get pulled in,” she said. “Dance is the sort of by-product.” 

On the other hand, dance might be learned or encouraged. Repetitive movements, such as sucking or arm flapping, are common behaviors for infants, but parents’ delight when they occur as music is playing may reinforce the behaviors. Babies could also be imitating parents’ movements, as with clapping. There is a lot of variability around when babies dance and how much they dance; perhaps these individual differences arise from different levels of encouragement and exposure. In a study of Brazilian and German preschoolers, for example, Brazilian children were better at tapping to a beat than German children. The authors attribute the difference to the Brazilian population studied, where dance is a bigger part of the culture (Kirschner and Ilari, 2013).  

Most likely both nature and nurture play a role. “I don’t think these are things that are pitted against each other,” said Cirelli. “Definitely it’s an interplay.”  

If dance is at least partially learned, should parents and caregivers be encouraging it? Cirelli stressed that parents shouldn’t feel guilty if dancing is not their thing. But if they want to give it a try, “having a dance party in the home is a really fun and active way of connecting,” she said. Her work has shown that when a parent moves in synchrony with their toddler, the toddler feels more connected to their parent and is more willing to help the parent complete a task. Research on older kids and adults also shows that moving together increases bonding.  

Dance could be particularly helpful to support children with various developmental needs. It can be a tool to help transition to a new task, regulate emotions, or create a playful situation for connection, said Cirelli. Moving to music could also help children with language delays. Research has shown, for instance, that children who are better at tapping to a musical beat also have better grammar skills (Gordon et al., 2015), and that 7-month-olds who move more rhythmically have better vocabulary at 20 months old (Nguyen et al., 2023). 

For any parent in the depths of a difficult moment, turning on music and starting to dance can be a lifeline. Song and dance can soothe distress—for both parent and child—and these musical tools can be a valuable part of the parenting toolkit.  

“In the moment, that makes parenting a little bit easier and that makes the connection a little bit stronger, and that’s going to have important consequences,” said Cirelli. 

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References 

Cirelli, L. K., & Kragness, H. E. (2025). The development of dance in early childhood. Current Directions in Psychological Science.  

Kirschner, S., & Ilari, B. (2013). Joint drumming in Brazilian and German preschool children: Cultural differences in rhythmic entrainment, but no prosocial effects. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 45(1), 137–166.  

Gordon, R. L., Shivers, C. M., Wieland, E. A., Kotz, S. A., Yoder, P. J., & Devin McAuley, J. (2015). Musical rhythm discrimination explains individual differences in grammar skills in children. Developmental Science, 18, 635–644.  

Nguyen, T., Reisner, S., Lueger, A., Wass, S. V., Hoehl, S., & Markova, G. (2023). Sing to me, baby: Infants show neural tracking and rhythmic movements to live and dynamic maternal singing. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 64, 101313.