If you are a parent, you probably have found out the hard way that children aren't the best at communicating their emotions in constructive and healthy ways. emotional outbursts for seemingly unreasonable triggers, physical demonstrations in place of words, and seemingly complete disregard for the context of location, i.e. public settings or institutional & social etiquettes. Well, this is simply because children don't have a history of emotional experiences to draw from. Every emotion is new, and raw, and impossible to understand, and therefor impossible to communicate with any reasonable degree of intelligence. But there is a way to jumpstart the process of healthy emotional communication... ITS MUSIC, ART, AND PLAY; being biased, I will say that playing drums is very likely the best of all of these.
Why?
Drumming is one of the rare instruments that combine the desire for primal physical release with our innate emotional connection to music. It is physically demanding, and that releases endorphins just like playing on the playground, but then it combines that feeling with true artistic internal expression. Children don't know why they feel the way they feel, or even how to tell you what that is... but psychologists have learned a long time ago that if you give a child a piece of paper and some crayons, the truth will come out, eventually. Well, not only does the same happen when you give them a pair of sticks, but the simple act of physically releasing that truth into an object is not only therapeutic, but mentally stimulating and literally providing that context needed when they are faced with the next emotional hurdle. They ask themselves, when I feel like this, what worked the last time... inevitably it will be, the drum set, and the power of those sticks. It will be the confidence and elation they felt.
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