As a busy parent, don’t you wish sometimes that life raising kids came with an “easy” button? So many things, it seems we have to figure out the hard way, through our own trial and error (that’s actually how this blog was born in the first place!). And if you’re parenting a neurodivergent child (as I am), you’ve probably noticed that the rules for parenting “normal” kids just don’t work for yours. What’s a parent to do?

As both a parent and a former classroom teacher, I’ve seen over and over how adaptations meant to help differently-abled students can actually help far more than just the students they target. Today’s hack falls into this category: using audible cues in your day-to-day parenting.

This post has ideas for other ways you can use auditory cues throughout your family’s day, and throughout your child’s years, to help them understand what needs to happen, self-regulate, and get done what needs to get done.

This is a collaboration post. However, please know I stand behind everything written here, and only include links to products/services/resources I’m willing to recommend personally.

Tips for Using Audible Cues as a Parent:

But first – what are audible cues, and why use them?

What are audible cues, also known as audio cues or sound cues or auditory cues? They’re bits of sound attached to everyday activities. If you sing your infant or toddler the exact same lullaby every evening at bedtime, you’re already using audible cues to help your child understand that it’s time to go to sleep.

Think about every time you hear your favorite song from high school, or the song you danced to at your wedding, or a favorite sound associated with your childhood. Instantly, you’re transported back to that moment: that sound is encoded in your brain as associated with that time or activity. That’s how powerful sound cues can be. And that’s why so many teachers use them, from preschool to high school.

If you’ve ever been in a preschool classroom, you may have noticed the teachers singing (or playing) different songs throughout their schedule: the special “clean-up” song, the song when it’s time to line up and leave the classroom, the song signaling it’s time for a snack. Early elementary teachers will play “wiggle break” songs in their classrooms; teachers for higher grades may have a chime or bell they use to get everyone’s attention, so they don’t have to call out over the din. These are all auditory cues.

But for those of us with neurodivergent kiddos, using audio cues to signal different activities throughout the day can be extra-helpful for their developing brains. Kids learn best with multisensory input, and adding audio cues to your day can help your children know what to expect next, making for smoother transitions and fewer meltdowns.

Using Audible Cues with Infants and Toddlers

So many routine parts of our parenting day are just plain more fun (not to mention easier to get through!) with a soundtrack. If you’re like me, you can use your creative juices to just make up short songs for different parts of the day.

I didn’t even do this consciously when the girls were little; I just found myself narrating our day with different songs that came into my head. We had a particular song I’d sing when changing a wet diaper, a different song for poopy diapers, one (composed by toddler Kimmie herself!) for going outside, and verbal sound effects for going over bumps in the road (like every time we backed into our driveway, which has a noticeable bump at the end).

It doesn’t matter whether you can carry a tune or not; audio cues work regardless. If you’re really self-conscious about your singing voice, though, you can always cue up clips of fave songs on your phone.

Here are other times of day when audio cues can help:

Getting up: I still remember my father, a war veteran, coming down the hall to wake me up with his own rendition of a bugle playing Reveille, but any wake-up song will do – or sing your favorite upbeat/morning song.
Narrating routines: Whether it’s prepping for mealtime, getting ready to go out of the house, or changing diapers, having auditory cues for each can help your kids clue in to what’s next.
Winding down: Naptime, bathtime, bedtime – all are times of transition and winding down that can go more smoothly with audio cues. If you’re at a loss, the Sesame Street classic “Rubber Ducky” is what we used for bathtime, and any favorite lullaby (or two or more), in the same order each night, makes a super foundation for a solid goodnight routine.
Solid sleep at night: A noise machine in your little’s bedroom is a great way both to signal that their room is a space for sleeping, and to help drown out background noise from outside their room.

Using Audio Cues with Preschoolers:

There are so many times of day when preschoolers can benefit from audio cues. Besides continuing with the above examples, add these new ones into your routines:

Reinforcing “big-kid” responsibilities: Besides cueing parts of your routine like waking up and winding down, auditory cues can help signal other transitions. If your kids are at preschool or daycare, find out what “cleanup song” they use there (as well as any other routine songs they incorporate into your child’s day), and use the same songs at home. Cleaning up, using the potty, and washing hands are all great opportunities to associate sounds with actions, and reinforcing what your kids learn away from home will make both settings go more smoothly.
“Warning signals” and other alerts: For other types of daily cues, you can even start to shift beyond music. A lot of kids do well with advance notice that transitions are coming (e.g., five more minutes until it’s time to clean up). Using a chime as a 5-minute warning sound can help your kids start to mentally prepare for that transition.
Learning and playing: The alphabet song and days of the week song aren’t the only ways sound can reinforce learning for this age group. You can make up games together incorporating different fun sounds, practice identifying numbers/letters/letter sounds together (hearing your voice identify these things will give audio reinforcement to the visual), and even dig up things like the old Schoolhouse Rock songs on Youtube or your favorite streaming service. (I used to play the Schoolhouse Rock multiplication tracks for preschool-aged Kimmie and Essie, and they’ve both excelled in math ever since.)

But where do I get these sounds?

If you have a special chime or bell around the house, you can put it to use for some of these transitions. For example, my husband picked up an old dinner-bell-style triangle on a family vacation when the kids were little, and hung it in the kitchen to summon everyone for dinner.

You can also have your kids help you pick out special sounds for different activities, using some of the same digital repositories teachers use to provide instant tactile and acoustic triggers for their students. Your littles will have a blast picking out the noises THEY want to cue them through your family’s daily routines as well as help reinforce their early learning-at-home!

Auditory cues for elementary school aged children, tweens, and teens:

As children enter their school-age years, savvy parents can find more and more opportunities to help them learn better, by using audio stimuli to reinforce their lessons:

Schoolhouse Rock may be old-school, but it’s still a great way to help young learners learn their times tables and parts of speech, especially if paired with tactile lessons (such as access to an abacus or other manipulatives, or a simple storybook where early readers can practice identifying parts of speech).
Ask your student’s teachers what songs or videos they use in class, or if they could provide you a playlist. From the “Days of the Week” song (sung to the Addams Family theme song) to entire video series geared toward helping students learn world and U.S. history, there are plenty of options out there spanning K-12 subjects to help 21st century students learn what they need to know for school.
For subjects or facts that your students just have to know but are struggling to learn, encourage them to create their own soundtracks, whether with auditory cues as discussed above, or by attaching the information to some of their own favorite music, or even making up their own tunes. The only way I could learn the heights of Africa’s two tallest peaks (Mt. Kilimanjaro, 19340 feet, and Mt. Kenya, 17058 feet) for a 9th-grade geography quiz was by making up a short jingle to go with each; I remember those heights to this day.
Your kids can also experiment with what sounds (or lack thereof) will help them get “into the zone” for homework. Just as a solid homework station is a must, neurodivergent and neurotypical kids alike can benefit from choosing a quiet track of “focus music,” or white (or brown) noise, or noise-cancelling headphones to signal to their brains that it’s work time.

Does this actually work?

YES, according to my kids! In fact, Kimmie’s current fave hack for drowning out annoying background noises is by using the Accessibility settings on her Apple devices.

Whether she’s trying to dull the incredibly loud HVAC system in our soon-to-be-renovated high school, or the neighbor’s dog barking after school, she just goes to Accessibility > Hearing > Audio & Visual > Background Sounds to access instant focus. “Dark noise,” her current fave, will be this year’s homework soundtrack, since it worked so well last year.

Your turn:

How have you used audible cues with your kids in day-to-day parenting? Or if you’re a teacher, how do you use them in the classroom? Let us know in the comments!

If you enjoyed this post on using audible cues, please share with others by pinning this image!

NOTE: This site contains affiliate links. I may earn a small commission from any purchases made through affiliate links, at no additional cost to you. For more information, please read the full disclosure/privacy policy.