Predicting who takes music lessonsparent and child characteristics

For decades, the dominant story about music and children's minds has been clean and optimistic: take lessons and get smarter. Studies comparing musically trained and untrained children routinely reported advantages in working memory, speech perception, and executive function. Parents enrolled their kids hoping for cognitive gains, and pediatricians nodded along. The assumption embedded in all of it was causal — practice the instrument and sharpen the mind. Corrigall and Schellenberg decided to look at that assumption from the other direction. Not what music lessons do to children, but what kind of children and what kind of parents end up taking them at all. That reversal turns out to change nearly everything. The key concept they bring to bear is niche-picking: the tendency for people to seek out environments that match their pre-existing traits. Curious, motivated, and intellectually open people gravitate toward intellectually stimulating activities. They don't just respond to environments; they select them. And when it comes to children, especially young ones, the adults in their lives do the selecting for them. Corrigall and Schellenberg framed this within a gene-environment correlation model. Early in development, parents' genotypes shape the environments their children inhabit — that's the passive form. Later, children's traits begin to evoke reactions from teachers, peers, and parents. Eventually, children actively seek out experiences that fit who they are. Music lessons, in this view, aren't just shaping children. They're being chosen by them or for them based on traits that were already there. To test this, the researchers recruited one hundred seventy children between seven and nine years old from the local community in Toronto. The key variable they were tracking wasn't whether a child had ever taken a lesson, but cumulative duration — total months of extracurricular music training outside of school. Duration was summed across instruments and concurrent lessons, so a child taking piano and violin at the same time for nine months counted as eighteen months of training. Across the full sample, the average was just over thirteen months, but among the ninety-eight children who had any training at all, the range ran from half a month to eighty-eight months. There was real spread to explain. Each child completed the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, a two-subtest IQ measure. The sample skewed educated and affluent — average IQ was one hundred eleven, well above population norms — which matters for interpreting the findings. Parents provided demographic information, rated their own personality on the Big Five Inventory, and rated their child's personality on a separate children's measure. The Big Five traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Openness is the one to keep in mind throughout; it captures intellectual curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, and a taste for new activities and skills. It turned out to be the hinge of the whole study. So what actually predicted how long a child kept taking music lessons? At the level of simple correlations, duration was associated with being older, coming from a higher-income family, having parents with more education, and participating in more non-musical extracurricular activities. IQ correlated with duration too, at a correlation of zero point two one. But the personality associations were at least as strong: child openness correlated at a correlation of zero point two four, child agreeableness at a correlation of zero point two five, and neuroticism was negatively associated at a correlation of negative zero point one five. Here is where the regression analysis becomes telling. When Corrigall and Schellenberg entered demographic variables and IQ together in the first step, they accounted for about eleven percent of the variance in music training duration. When they added children's personality traits — openness, agreeableness, and neuroticism — in the second step, that figure jumped to seventeen percent, an additional six percent explained. Critically, once personality was in the model, IQ's association with duration became non-significant. The apparent link between intelligence and music training dissolved when you accounted for what kind of person the child was. This replicates what earlier work found with older groups. Corrigall and colleagues in two thousand thirteen found openness and conscientiousness predicting duration in ten to twelve-year-olds, and Hille and Schupp in two thousand fourteen found conscientiousness predicting it in seventeen-year-olds. The pattern is stable across development. A child's curiosity and agreeableness, not their raw intelligence, is what predicts whether they keep going. But the most striking finding in the study involves the parents. Even after all those child-level predictors — demographics, IQ, and personality — were statistically controlled, parents' openness to experience still predicted how long their children took music lessons. Parents' openness had the single largest simple correlation with duration in the dataset, at a correlation of zero point three zero. Adding it to the full regression model increased explained variance by an additional four point seven percent, and the final model accounted for twenty-two percent of the variance overall. The partial correlation for parent openness was zero point two four, significant at a p-value of zero point zero zero three. Think about what it means for that association to survive child-level controls. It's not just that open parents have open kids who then choose music. Even when you account for the child's own personality, their IQ, their family's income, and parental education — something about the parent's curiosity and aesthetic sensibility is still doing independent work. Corrigall and Schellenberg characterize openness behaviorally as an interest in the arts, intellectual curiosity, a tendency to try new activities, and what they call aesthetic sensitivity — a genuine appreciation of music, art, and dance. Open parents, it seems, build households where music lessons are a natural thing to do. They notice music and value it. So their children end up in it. This is exactly what the passive gene-environment correlation framework predicts. At ages seven to nine, parents are still the primary architects of a child's environment. A parent high in openness creates conditions — an instrument in the house, an appreciation for practice, the initiative to find a teacher — that steer a child toward musical training before that child has much say in the matter. As the child grows, their own traits take on more explanatory weight. Openness in the child predicts continuation. In even older samples, conscientiousness becomes the relevant trait — the self-discipline to maintain deliberate practice. The baton of influence passes gradually from parent to child. And that shift matters enormously for how we interpret the broader literature. Corrigall and Schellenberg point to a body of evidence showing that these traits aren't randomly distributed. Each Big Five personality dimension has a heritability of around fifty percent. IQ heritability rises to over eighty percent in adulthood. Deliberate practice explains only twenty-one percent of variance in music performance, and practice itself has a genetic contribution of thirty-eight percent. Musical accomplishment has a genetic contribution of twenty-six percent. These numbers collectively suggest that the children who take music lessons and who keep taking them are not a random sample of children. They arrive at the lesson room already different — in personality, in intellectual curiosity, and probably in musical aptitude. Which means that when a study reports a cognitive advantage among musically trained children, it has to reckon with a serious alternative explanation. If the trained group is, from the start, higher in openness, higher in conscientiousness, higher in socioeconomic status, and higher in IQ, then the advantage you observe might be a portrait of who those children were before the first lesson ever happened. Training effects and selection effects become nearly impossible to disentangle in the kinds of observational and quasi-experimental designs that dominate this literature. There are real limits to what one study can establish. The sample was drawn from a relatively affluent, highly educated community in a Western cultural context where private music lessons are both common and expensive. The niche-picking dynamics Corrigall and Schellenberg describe — where families with resources and high openness are most likely to pursue lessons — may look quite different in cultures where musical training is more communal, less costly, or more structurally integrated into education. The researchers flag this explicitly. The developmental window matters too: in this sample, children's agreeableness was a significant predictor, probably because agreeable seven-year-olds go along with what their parents decide. That particular association likely fades as children gain more autonomy over their own schedules. What this study ultimately does is reframe the relationship between environment and child. Music training isn't something that randomly falls on some children and not others. It arrives in the lives of children whose parents are curious and aesthetically engaged and who are themselves curious and easy to direct. The environment, here, is a product of who the child and the parent already are. That's the shift in thinking this paper is pushing for, and it should push music researchers to take selection effects far more seriously than they typically have. This lecture was created by ennepō. Go to https://ennepo.ai to Discover, Create and Follow the latest research in your field. Read when you can. Listen when you want to.