If your child likes playing an instrument, or you want them to be well-rounded, by all means get them music lessons; but parents who bought into social science claims that it makes kids more 'intelligent' are basically wasting money.
Music is great, I have played guitar for 35 years, but I never bought into the hype that music was a contributing factor in making me much smarter than you.
Who is debunking the psychology claim that music boosts intelligence? Thankfully, other psychologists, a welcome sign of a return to credibility for the field. At the AAAS meeting last weekend, Professor Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist from the University of Toronto analyzed the link between musical training and intelligence in a group of 130 children who were aged 10 to 12.
The association between music lessons and intelligence was mainly down to the children's personalities, he said. When they took into account the contribution of each child's personality to their school grades and IQ scores, and removed it from the overall equation, the link between music training and intelligence disappeared.
Learning instrument does not make children more intelligent, experts claim by Nick Collins, The Telegraph
