Sing for the unborn!

Moreover it is all about babies, who are only going to be born into this world. And they are going to make them healthier by singing.

The maternity hospitals of Almaty switched to breast feeding of the new born babies by mothers right after their birth many years ago. The official medicine maintains that such after-birth contact with the mother is becoming almost a future positive life programme for the child.

The non-traditional medicine went even further: today there are at least three centres in the Southern capital helping to establish a contact with the unborn children to the future parents. Why do they do it?

We are preparing future telepaths, cosmonauts, or else…? Most likely, the "else", because the space theme has nothing to do with it. Everybody simply wants their children to be born in time, gifted, healthy and happy. And how to do it, in the sense of receiving guarantees of the above mentioned characteristics, they do not know. Specialists from the city healthy lifestyle formation centre, the human reproduction centre and the family support centre "Aist" are sure that the physiological side of healthy children birth depends on the psychological one a great deal. Therefore it is in these centres that future child cabinets were opened, where the potential mothers and fathers learn how to find a common language with the pre-natal baby, to think about the new family member. True, according to statistics, fathers somehow learn to "deliver babies" together with their wives: but there are not too many people visiting joint pre-natal preparation courses. And those who would like to communicate with the baby through music, singing, dancing, pictures - are even less. (As classics rightly observed: "The Daddy ain't have no time, gotta clean his machine-gun"). Future Mummies instead realise the importance of the forthcoming moment and try not to lose an opportunity to show love, affection and care to the future kid. As mothers themselves admit, for some it is just their due to a fashion. All Europe communicates telepathically with pre-natal kids, which are not being born without a special training. For others - it's a real chance to produce a healthy kid. For that the mothers are ready to sing, dance, breathe correctly and tell tales to the babies in their bellies. Their choice is completely supported by psychologists. They assert that it is exactly from the pre-natal state that the formation of many life knots begins. How could we do without them?

In the family support centre "Aist" a musical therapeutist Sayeeda Zakirjanova offers her lessons of musical communication with pre-natal kids to future mothers. The programme is called "Conatal" - it is a Russian variant, helping the women from the Near Abroad to deliver children not shouting and screaming, but singing joyously. By the way, there already are singing delivering mothers in the Southern capital. And there are even more singing future mothers.

What do they sing and what for? An existence of some programme implies that singing must be well-founded scientifically. And it is. For us, who have grown on lullaby traditions solely, it is maybe difficult to imagine that songs are not only pleasant to hear and good for falling asleep, but are also a powerful information flow, carrying primary biorhythms, an energy potential and simply information.

Besides, all lyrics for the pregnant are divided into three semesters, related with the particularities of the child brain formation. Scientists explain it in complicated clever forms, but to put it simply, in the first period a moving matrix is formed within a pre-natal kid, in the second one - the emotionial one, in the third one - an archetypal matrix, responsible for the ideas formation. From the scientific point of view a song becomes a real quantum for the future baby formation. Not occasionally the whole singing cycle is divided into sections: rhythms of the nature, a movement music, a zoo programme, a musical geography, lullabies for boys, lullabies for girls, music of the colours, rhythms of a day.

Sayeeda Zakirjanova says that she recommends to the women to start singing as soon as a pregnancy is established, no matter if there is good voice or not. For a child it doesn't matter, for him/her the availability of a sound coming from a loving person is important. A sound matrix of life activity is formed within a child when s/he listens to the mother. Children, carried with a song, are born healthier and more gifted. It has already been proven. And an outsider, looking at it objectively, would perhaps add that singing children are born more adapted for life. Where and which Mummy would care to tell her kid (literally depict) an image of the father, an image of the mother, an image of the house, in which s/he will live, an image of relatives, who will meet him/her on the Earth and an image of the world, into which s/he will come. Mothers admit that such a detailed preparation of these habitual things, often brings them into a dead end, but they follow all recommendations and home tasks of unusual lessons scrupulously. They want to help their children to start living joyously and without problems. What's interesting is that in the centre the mothers seek to define the name of the future kid as soon as possible and start calling him/her by name. Specialists insist on such respectful and delicate attitude towards a little human being.

The author of "Conatal" programme, Mikhail L.Lazarev, Ph.D. in medicine, believes that we all live in quite an aggressive world, in which it is very difficult to oppose evil. Whenever a mother sings her kind songs full of love, she already creates the bases of her child's selective capacity, forming his personal qualities as an individuality. Plus, the mother and the kid learn how to communicate with each other actively.

Yet in 1982 a Japanese scientist with the help of special equipment defined that a pre-natal baby was hearing everything that was going on inside and outside his/her mother. And recently a Russian scientist invented a device called audiophone. Two funnels: a big one and a small one are connected by a pipe. A mother speaks into a small funnel, putting the big one to her belly - and the acoustic admittance inside the belly is increased. The fact that a child hears and communicates with a mother is confirmed by all pregnant women. During the singing or conversations babies start moving. Some, with a wrong posture, manage to take a right posture after a communication.

Helena Nikitina, director of "Aist" centre, also sees purely medical reasons for the singing preparation of women: "Each of future mothers also performs breathing vocal exercises, which seriously influences the hormonal status of a human being, prevents depressions, also saving the kid from long patologic hypoxias. At the same time the mother's singing is the best school of preparation for a childbirth, exactly because mothers learn how to breathe and not to breathe. The last condition becomes the most instructive one. Musical classes prepare Mums for the so-called "М-test" - it's when the women pronounce the sound "m" during a long exhale. At the same time the Mum does not breathe, the fruit starts to perceive an artificial oxygene hunger, which completely imitates the childbirth process. The Mums increase the pause in breathing, and the children get a training at the same time. What's more, we speak about an efficient influence of music on women and children with such certainty, because all musical compositions were written with consideration of the heartbeat rhythms. Once hearing the songs from "Conatal" musical methodics you already can't give them up. They sort of enter into every cell of the body and "play" there - live there".

In conclusion - a few words about the healing music. In Moscow Pedagogical Institute there is a subject called musical-rational psychotherapy. Songs are prescribed to people like pills: for such disease - such songs, so many times a day. And the most progressive trend in the psychotherapy is the therapy by creative self-expression as is widely recognised. The family support centre "Aist" has a right to represent this unusual therapy in Kazakhstan.