How Music Helps Us Pass Family Traditions on to Our Children
You Don’t Have to Share a Culture to Share a Tradition
by Maria Wang, Teacher at TipToe Music - September 2026
Hello Everybody - Miss Maria here! I want to give you something to think about…. How do you keep family traditions alive if we’re raising our children far from where we grew up? And how do we give them a strong sense of where they come from while also helping them understand the world around them?
For me, the answer has often been music.
Now summer has faded and the weather is cooling, it means it’s time for the Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhōngqiū Jié) - a big deal for my family! This year it is today - September 25th - it always falls on the 15th day of the eighth month according to the Chinese lunisolar calendar. As a Chinese person living in Canada, I think the Mid-Autumn Festival and Thanksgiving have a lot in common. Firstly, they are the biggest festivals celebrated in the Fall. Both holidays bring families together to give thanks for the harvest, and It’s also about food - yum! Mooncakes are for the Mid-Autumn Festival what turkey and pumpkin pie is for Thanksgiving - did you know?
When I was little, my parents would take me to my grandparents’ home. We usually celebrated as a big family. The kids played around while grown-ups prepared the food. At the dinner table, we ate, chatted, laughed and listened to grandparents telling us stories of the good old days. After dinner, we went outside to admire the Moon. The super big, round Moon would shine upon us, leaving all the little ones mesmerized, wondering who was living on it. Chang’e the Moon goddess? Together with the white rabbit? Or maybe just astronauts? Now I have become a mom, living with my son and husband in a different country, speaking a language different to my mother tongue most of the time. I have been wondering what I can do to carry on family and cultural traditions, whilst encouraging my son to be a global citizen. Below are some thoughts - I hope you find them helpful.
Music makes memories stick
Music has an amazing way of connecting memories with emotion. A familiar song can take us back to a particular person, place or moment, sometimes years after we first heard it - a bit like a time machine! Last year I experienced this first-hand. My son and I were reading Chinese festival poems together around this time of the year. I couldn’t believe that I still remembered every single word from one poem called How Long will the Full Moon Appear. How was that even possible? I had not read it for at least 25 years. And why did I only remember this one? During my school years I had recited hundreds of them! I found myself humming a tune too and then I knew why! It was more than a poem; it was a song. That is the reason it got ‘stuck’ in my memory for so long. I love this memory and I secretly want something similar for my son too. So, it has now become part of my family tradition to sing this song together during our family FaceTime every year celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival with grandparents in China. We might be physically oceans apart, but we are deeply emotionally attached.
I think this is one of the many beautiful things about music. It can give children another pathway into a memory, helping words, feelings and experiences become connected. So if you’re looking for a simple way to make a family tradition more memorable, add a song.
Give chants a chance to shine
Chanting is another simple way to bring music into everyday family life. For young children, it sits somewhere between speaking and singing, making it an accessible way to play with words, rhythm and sound, and it serves as a stepping stone. There is also an interesting connection between rhythm and early literacy. Research has found relationships between children’s rhythm skills and their phonological awareness, the ability to notice and work with the sounds within spoken language. You don’t need a complicated activity or a perfectly planned lesson. Try clapping a rhythm, repeating a silly phrase, chanting a poem or making up your own family chant. And sometimes, the simplest things really do stick. At our Mid-Autumn Festival pop-up last year, Maria combined a Chinese poem with Fireworks, a chant from the Music Together® curriculum. Six months later, a mom told her that her daughter was still chanting it at home without any prompting. That’s the kind of music memory we love and when this music teacher knows she has done something right!
Celebrate the diversity around us
Traditions are also an invitation to learn about one another. You don’t have to be Chinese to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. You can be curious about the story, learn a song, try mooncakes, make a lantern or simply step outside and look at the moon together. Last year I was over the moon to see more than half of the families joining my Mid Autumn Festival Celebration class were non-Asian.
For children, experiences like these can help make cultural differences feel familiar rather than unfamiliar. Research and child-development writing have explored how exposure to different cultures and perspectives can help broaden children’s understanding, encourage curiosity and support empathy, and perhaps that’s one of the most valuable things we can give our children.
We can teach them about where we come from while making space for the people and traditions around us. And for me, that’s what it means to be a global citizen: staying connected to my culture while helping my son grow up curious about the world beyond it. And music gives us a beautiful way to do both.
About Maria
Maria leads our classes in Oakville and Missisauga this Fall - she also leads our Music Together® with Mandarin programming. She has been a mom in our classes for many years and still joins Rhythm Kids® every week with her son for our older kids drumming, music and movement classes.
Research Links:
Music, memory and emotion by Lutz Jäncke, National Library of Medicine https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776393/
Music related memory by Elena Popan, EBSCO, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/psychology/music-related-memory
Music: The Last Thing We Forget by Francine Foo and Elizabeth L. Johnson, Frontiers, https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2017.00005
Links between early rhythm skills, musical training, and phonological awareness, Catherine Moritz, Sasha Yampolsky, Georgios Papadelis, Jennifer Thomson & Maryanne Wolf, Reading and Writing, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11145-012-9389-0#citeas
Sing It! Chant It! Learn It! by Rebecca Swartz, Illinois Early Learning Project, https://illinoisearlylearning.org/blogs/sing-chant/
How Exposure to Diversity Can Help All Children (And Adults), by Vanessa LoBue Ph.D., Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-baby-scientist/202303/how-exposure-to-diversity-can-help-all-children-and-adults
The Benefits of Exploring Different Cultures for Mental Wellbeing, by Lily Vesel, ICES USA, https://blog.icesusa.org/the-benefits-of-exploring-different-cultures-for-mental-wellbeing | 
