Accessible summary  Many parents with learning disabilities have their children removed and put into care.  Parents with learning disabilities often need support to manage their children and to be good parents.  This article is about how we worked with parents to find a way of seeing whether the support given to them is helpful.  If parenting support is seen to be helpful, more funding may be available for future support. Summary There has been a steady increase over the last 20 years in the number of parents with learning disabilities who are referred to social workers and community health practitioners. It is a common experience for parents with learning disabilities to have their child removed from the home and placed permanently in care, and although they are often judged as inadequate parents, it is known that they can be good enough parents when provided with parenting support. This article reports the development of a tool to measure the self‐efficacy of parents with learning disabilities, which will help to evaluate parenting initiatives specifically aimed at this parent group. A tool to measure parenting self‐efficacy (TOPSE) has been adapted to be accessible to parents with learning disabilities. Eighteen parents took part in the study to complete and comment on the tool with the help of a researcher from the community learning disabilities team. This tool, which consists of 45 self‐efficacy statements, now needs to be tested on a larger sample of parents with learning disabilities.

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Abstract:Recently, many studies have emphasized the role of body movements in processing, sharing and giving meaning to music. At the same time, neuroscience studies, suggest that different parts of the brain are integrated and activated by the same stimuli: sounds, for example, can be perceived by touch and can evoke imagery, energy, fluency and periodicity. This interaction of auditory, visual and motor senses can be found in the verbal descriptions of music and among children during their spontaneous games. The question to be asked is, if a more multisensory and embodied approach could redefine some of our assumptions regarding musical education. Recent research on embodiment and multimodal perception in instrumental teaching could suggest new directions in musical education. Can we consider the integration between the activities of body movement, listening, metaphor visualization, and singing, as more effective than a disembodied and fragmented approach for the process of musical understanding?

Recent findings in music research are increasingly confirming the embodied nature of music cognition. Assuming that a bodily engagement with music may affect the children’s musical meaning formation, we investigated how young children’s interaction with music, based on verbal description after listening versus body movement description while listening, may be reflected in the verbal explanation of their own visual representations of the music they listened to. In this study, 47 children (aged 9–10) without any formal music education participated in a verbal-based versus movement-based intervention. Before and after the interventions, children created a visual representation of the music and provided a verbal explanation of their drawing. Thematic analysis and statistical tests on the verbal data revealed a significant change in semantic themes, time dimension, and the number of music parameters gathered by children involved in body movement description of the music. Our results offer interesting insights on the role of body movement on children’s pattern perception and musical meaning formation.

An increasing amount of research emphasises the influence of body movement on the perception of music. This study contributes to the research by investigating whether varied qualities of body movement, when aligned to music may affect the way children attribute meaning to that music. To address this question, 34 children (aged 9–10) were divided into two groups, each of which engaged in distinct listening activities by aligning with discrete versus continuous movements on diverse pieces of music. As a pre- and post-test, children were first invited to move freely to a piece of music and subsequently to draw a visual representation of the piece. Finally, they were asked to verbally explain how the drawings were linked with the music. Findings, based on the children’s drawings and verbal explanations, offer interesting insights on the way different qualities of body movement can influence the categories of visual representations, arousal and voices of the music described. Moreover, the role of visual representation emerges as a way to gain insight into a child’s musical sense-making, principally when the product is analysed together with the process and the gestures employed to accomplish it. The findings of this study may offer relevant insights for music education. Firstly, in the way movement may influence music sense-making and secondly, how multimodal interaction (bodily, visual and verbal) may inform the process of musical understanding in children.