Key points

Even as infants, we learn to play along.

Dance recruits our feet, our brains, and our friends.

Harmony is the surprise and the reward of musical play.

When thinking about why play is so crucial to our balanced social, physical, and mental development, so key to our sense of belonging and reciprocity and fun, it pays to begin at the beginning, and then follow along.

Tuning Up, Tuning In

Play first stirs in the mutual, musical back-and-forth cooing of mother and infant. This proto-play practices attunement . Before we learn to talk, we learn to chortle and gurgle and babble and hum along. Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson noted that this pleasurable and surprising dialog “negotiates the first interpersonal encounters, the light of the eyes, the features of the face, and the sou

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