Estimated reading time 3 minutes
Table of Contents
Introduction
Do you need to find music that will help your student relax and calm down? Do you want to find compositions that will help focus your child’s attention so that homework can get done? Music can be a tremendous help for ADHD children, but not all styles work equally well. Keep reading to find out what genres get the job done and to learn the 10 best calm relaxing music selections for ADHD kids.
This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission from purchases made through the links. I’ll only recommend products I use, use in lessons, or ones my students or colleagues have recommended.
The Top 10 Best Calm Relaxing Music Selections for ADHD Kids: What Styles Work Best?
What genres will work best? Before we get into that, we need to talk about how songs affect children with ADHD.
No. 1: What happens when your child listens to music?
- First, people with ADHD have issues with distractibility, anxiety, and low dopamine levels, which is important for motivational salience.
- When ADHD kids listen to music, it increases their dopamine levels.
- When dopamine levels increase, it naturally increases their ability to focus.
No. 2: There are two ways you can pay attention.
- Conscious Attention: You use this when you choose to pay attention to something. Thus, this type of attention is critical for staying focused on tasks such as schoolwork. However, it can get distracted by the next type of attention.
- Unconscious Attention: This type of attention was particularly important during the hunter-gatherer days. Why? Because if you were a hunter-gatherer who heard a sound outside your hut, you might want to eat it, or it might want to eat you. Therefore, unconscious attention was an important early-warning survival system that ran in the background of your brain as you worked on other tasks.
- ADHD: Even though our world is less dangerous now, we still have unconscious attention working in the background, distracting us from the task at hand. This becomes an ever-present struggle for ADHD children, who have this ability in spades.
No. 3: The Goal
Thus, the goal is to increase dopamine levels while giving the unconscious attention system something to listen to so that it won’t distract your child’s conscious mind.
No. 4: Some styles work better for this goal than others.
Avoid:
- Songs with lyrics
- Songs on the radio
- Songs on streaming platforms that contain ads
Play:
- Instrumental pieces (jazz, fusion, movie scores, marching band, etc.)
- Classical is particularly effective
- Ambient music
The Top 10 Best Calm Relaxing Music Selections for ADHD Kids: 10 Relaxing Classical Compositions
Here are ten of the catchiest relaxing music compositions in the classical instrumental repertoire:
Video: Bach - Air on G String
Video: Beethoven - Fur Elise
Video: Chopin - Nocturne
Video: Debussy - Afternoon of the Faun
Video: Handel - Royal Fireworks
Video: Mozart - Sonata in C Major
Video: Mussorgsky - Pictures at an Exhibition
Video: Saint-Saens - Organ Symphony Finale
Video: Smetana - The Moldau
Video: Tchaikovsky - Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy
The Top 10 Best Calm Relaxing Music Selections for ADHD Kids: Calm Ambient Music Selections
Here are some calm ambient compositions.
I’ve included only two videos here because they’re both lengthy compositions of 3 hours or more.
Video: ADHD Focus Tunes
Video: ADHD Sensory Soothing
The following links have calm and relaxing instrumental selections you can buy.
Final Thoughts
Takeaway points:
- The goal is to increase dopamine levels while giving the unconscious attention system something to listen to so that it won’t distract your child’s conscious mind.
- Instrumental pieces work well for achieving this goal with classical music working the best.
- In addition, ambient music generally has a very calming effect on ADHD children.
Having said that, all kids are different, so try various instrumental genres to see what works best for your child or student.
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