The Lullaby Project five years on: Evaluating the well-being impact and legacy of singing a child's story

A report of the
The Haringey Lullaby Project -an arts-based intervention for pre-school children. Based in local authority Children’s Centres and using the medium of song to tell aspects of a child's story. The aims of the project are to enhance children’s social, psychological and intellectual well-being. Each intervention generates an original song or lullaby for a focus child through an extended process of conversation and co-composition between practitioner and carer. The songs describe the child’s life, loves and character in highly original and culturally sensitive ways. Specific objectives for children and carers are to increase their sense of social connectedness and reduce social isolation through shared and personalised musical experience. The researcher returned to children and their carers who had participated in the project five years earlier and discussed the impact of the project. Themes arising from these conversations included: The continuity of influence of the songs, the connections made through them, the importance of feelings of meaning and identity enhanced or established by the songs and the impact of the songs on speech and language