What Does Choir Actually Teach Kids? More Than You Might Think

Choir is about much more than singing. It teaches children how to listen, concentrate, collaborate, communicate, persevere, and find their voice.

As a new school year begins, families are choosing activities that will shape their children's afternoons, friendships, and development throughout the year.

Sports teach teamwork. Dance develops coordination. Theater builds confidence. Art encourages creativity.

Choir brings many of these skills together and adds something uniquely powerful: children learn to create something beautiful together that none of them could create alone.

Ask anyone who's spent time in a children's choir rehearsal, and they'll tell you it's not simply a group of kids learning songs. It's a place where young people develop musicianship, discipline, confidence, communication, leadership, and a sense of belonging. Here's what children actually learn through a serious choral music education.

1. Choir Teaches Children How to Listen

Good singing begins with listening—not just to your own voice, but to the section around you, the conductor, and the shape of the phrase everyone is moving through together. A singer is constantly asking: Am I in tune? Am I blending? Is my vowel matching the ensemble?

There's a biological dimension to this, too. Researchers at Northwestern University's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory found that musically trained preschoolers develop stronger neural responses for picking a voice out of background noise than their untrained peers, and that this advantage grows with continued training.¹ In other words, the "listening" choir asks of children isn't just a metaphor—it's a skill with a measurable footprint in how the young brain processes sound.

Over time, children learn that being a strong musician isn't only about producing their own sound. It's about hearing and responding to what's happening around them.

2. Choir Develops Concentration and Discipline

Learning to sing well takes practice: remembering music, following a score, repeating a difficult passage until it finally clicks. That process teaches an important lesson – progress doesn't always happen immediately, but consistent effort produces results.

It's worth being honest about what research actually shows here. A 2017 study of 265 school-age children in an out-of-school orchestral music program found associations between music education and gains in academic achievement and executive-function measures.² But a larger 2020 meta-analysis of 6,984 participants across 254 studies found that once study quality is controlled for, music training does not produce reliable general improvements in cognitive or academic outcomes.³

The honest takeaway: music's value isn't that it makes kids better at math. Its value is broader – sustained practice in attention, memory, listening, self-discipline, and working toward a shared goal.

3. Choir Teaches Collaboration

In a choir, no single voice makes the music work. Children learn to balance their sound with others, breathe together, and contribute to a shared goal. Your success is not separate from the success of the team – a lesson that matters well beyond rehearsal.

This isn't just intuition. In a widely cited study, developmental psychologists Sebastian Kirschner and Michael Tomasello found that four-year-olds who sang and moved together in a simple musical activity were subsequently more likely to spontaneously help and cooperate with each other than children who did the same joint activity without music.⁴ Making music together, in other words, appears to prime children for cooperation in a way that's measurable even outside the music room.

4. Choir Builds Communication and Confidence

Singing is communication – of emotion, character, and musical ideas, through breath, tone, phrasing, and physical presence. Performing gives young people repeated chances to stand in front of an audience and be heard. For a shy child, that can be transformative.

It's also fair to say this isn't automatic or universal. Research on young performers consistently finds that performance anxiety is common and, for some students, can chip away at self-esteem rather than build it – particularly as children move into adolescence.⁵ What the research does suggest is that confidence tends to track with a student's sense of their own competence, built through repeated, well-supported practice rather than performance alone.⁶ That's an argument for choir programs that invest in students gradually and supportively, not a reason to assume every child will simply "come out of their shell."

Confidence grows when children repeatedly discover: "I can do something that once felt difficult," with the right support behind them.

5. Choir Develops Real Musical Skills

Children build pitch accuracy, rhythm, vocal technique, music reading, ear training, and harmony as they progress through a program's levels. Unlike many academic subjects, the result is immediately audible as they can hear a chord lock into place, or a difficult passage finally work.

6. Choir Teaches Perseverance

A difficult interval, a foreign-language text, a recording take that doesn't go as planned – choir gives children a structured environment where mistakes are part of learning. They learn that "I can't do this yet" is very different from "I can't do this."

7. Choir Creates Belonging

Perhaps the most important thing choir gives a child can't be measured on a report card: a place to belong. Children enter rehearsal as individuals and leave as part of an ensemble – making friends, working toward performances together, sharing pre-concert nerves and post-concert relief.

Research on group singing backs this up. A mixed-methods study of children in group singing programs found associations between singing participation and stronger subjective wellbeing, including a greater sense of connection to peers.⁷ For many kids, choir becomes their community, and a child who feels connected to a group is more likely to see themselves as someone with something valuable to contribute.

8. Choir Can Be Part of a Strong College Journey

Parents sometimes ask whether choir helps with college admissions. The honest answer: choir is not a shortcut to admission, and no extracurricular substitutes for strong academic preparation. But sustained involvement in a meaningful activity builds qualities that matter in college and beyond – commitment, collaboration, leadership, and the ability to pursue something deeply over time.

Many universities look at applicants as more than test scores. UCLA describes a holistic review process that weighs academic achievement alongside personal qualities and achievement in creative endeavors, including the performing arts.⁸ UC Berkeley similarly describes a holistic review process that considers academic and personal achievements in context, including activities and leadership.⁹

The distinction that matters is depth over résumé padding. A student who spends years growing as a musician and contributing to an ensemble has a real story to tell not just a box checked.

9. Choir Gives Children Something That Lasts

Classes change. Teachers change. Children grow. But the skills built through music stay with them: listening deeply, working patiently, performing courageously, collaborating generously, and taking pride in doing something well. They're developing themselves.

Find your voice. Learn to listen to others. Work together. Keep growing. And use your voice to make something meaningful.

That's the case for choir – not just as an activity to fill an afternoon, but as one of the more quietly powerful things a young person can do with their time.

Sources

¹ Strait, D. L., Parbery-Clark, A., O'Connell, S., & Kraus, N. (2013). Biological impact of preschool music classes on processing speech in noise. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 6, 51–60. ScienceDirect

² Holochwost, S. J., Propper, C. B., Wolf, D. P., Willoughby, M. T., Fisher, K. R., Kolacz, J., Volpe, V., & Jaffee, S. R. (2017). Music education, academic achievement, and executive functions. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(2), 147–166. ResearchGate

³ Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2020). Cognitive and academic benefits of music training with children: A multilevel meta-analysis. Memory & Cognition. PubMed

⁴ Kirschner, S., & Tomasello, M. (2010). Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-year-old children. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(5), 354–364. ScienceDirect

⁵ Patston, T., & Osborne, M. S. (2024). Factors associated with music performance anxiety in adolescents: A systematic review. Journal of Adolescence. ScienceDirect

⁶ Bersh, B. (2022). The relationship between music performance anxiety and self-efficacy in sixth- to eighth-grade instrumental students. Psychology of Music, 50(5), 1477–1493. SAGE Journals

⁷ Davies, C., et al. (2023). The impact of group singing on children's subjective well-being: Mixed methods research. Children & Society. Wiley Online Library

⁸ UCLA Undergraduate Admission – First-Year Requirements

⁹ UC Berkeley – Selection Process

Sing on!

MUSYCA

About MUSYCA

MUSYCA (Musical Youth of California) is a Los Angeles-based choral arts organization providing vocal training, musicianship education, and performance opportunities for young singers. The choir collaborates regularly with professional artists and participates in concerts, recordings, and community events throughout Southern California.

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