Music-based intervention in children

Music-based interventions with children are an effective method in health and sickness treatment and in education systems. The engagement with music enables positive transfer effects on extra-musical developmental domains. Music therapy was applied primarily as a practically-oriented scientific discipline both within the framework of a multi-modal therapy approach as one treatment component and focused specifically on children with emotional disorders within a somatic therapy concept and in rehabilitation. The following narrative overview will present music therapy's working basis, treatment goals, and select outcome research in children from 2005-2010. There currently exists a substantial lack, even within empirical research, in relation to the application of music therapy to children. This is an opportunity to initiate a broad range of study for the future. Current challenges and opportunities in scientific, music-based intervention in the paediatric population lie in the concretization of differential indications (both in intervention approach and duration), replicable comparative therapy (alternated treatment-design), the application of a music-therapeutic placebo requirement, as well as in the verification and analysis of specific music therapeutic mechanisms.