With a Little Help from My Friends

The unexpected power of peer connection in performance anxiety

Tagged: 💛 For Parents | 🎵 For Teachers | 🎓 For Researchers

This series draws on peer-reviewed research in music psychology and music education. References and further reading are listed at the foot of each post. Where findings from my own doctoral research are shared, this will be clearly indicated.

In the first week of the eight-week programme, the children were strangers in a shared experience.

They sat slightly apart from each other. They glanced sideways and then quickly down. They held their bodies in the careful, contained way young people hold themselves when they are not yet sure what kind of room they have walked into. Field notes from Week 1 share some insights:

The room was very quiet, there was very little social interaction, eyes were cast downwards, body language protective — closed off.

By Week 8, when they stood together in the wings of the concert, that picture had changed entirely. They stood close. They touched shoulders. They made quiet eye contact and quieter gestures. They had built, between them, the relational infrastructure that allowed the most anxious among them to step from the edge of the room toward the microphone.

This post is about that metamorphosis. About what was built between them in those weeks, why it mattered for their confidence and how they experienced music performance anxiety, and what it can add to our understanding as carers, educators and researchers.

Beginning in silence

Across the first interviews and the first weeks of field notes, what the data show most consistently is individual isolation. Each of the eight children had arrived carrying their own private relationship with performance anxiety, and their first drawings — made in response to the prompt draw a picture of yourself singing in front of family and friends — showed it in eight different ways.

One child drew a thick wall dividing the singer from everyone else on the page — anxiety represented not as a feeling inside the performer but as a structure of separation. Another drew herself on an otherwise empty stage with only her teacher for company: a relational world, at that point, with a population of two. Another produced a careful taxonomy of audiences — family, friends, “random people” — and recorded the same two-word verdict under every single one: nervous, embarrassed. And one drew an audience that was entirely on her side — a crowd of cheering heads calling well done and good job — while behind a backstage wall a small figure waited with a thought bubble reading nervous and excited.

That last drawing matters, because it complicates the story we usually tell. The imagined audience was not hostile. The nervousness persisted anyway. What the anxiety attached to was not expected criticism but the exposure of being seen and heard at all.

And what is striking, looking across all eight first drawings, is what none of them contained. No peers. Not one child drew another young singer beside them. Whatever else varied — the wall, the taxonomy, the cheering crowd — the early experience of performance, as these children carried it into the studio, was something faced by oneself.

This is the baseline against which everything that followed must be read.

The emergence of peer connection

The shift from individual isolation to peer connection did not happen in a single moment. It happened through the slow, repeated accumulation of small relational acts — many of which appeared, at the time, to be incidental.

The field notes from the first weeks document what looks like ordinary classroom activity: warm-up games, name games, group breathing, songs everyone was learning together. From a pedagogical standpoint, much of it was structured around skill-building. From a relational standpoint, it was building something else. As early as Week 2, the children were monitoring each other’s breathing during a breath-control game I saw you take a breath!And mutual attention was becoming a playful resource rather than an evaluative threat. This is the kind of informal, playful interaction through which, as the Australian music education researcher Margaret Barrett has shown, children actively build musical communities — trust established in the body, through shared activity, before the more vulnerable forms of vocal exposure are required.

By Week 3, the field notes record an unmistakable shift: students forming friendships, actively finding ways to help each other — and, tellingly, a bit of eye-rolling and groaning about activities, which I read at the time (and immensely enjoyed) as the behaviour of children who now felt safe enough to be mildly irreverent. Quinn put the connection between friendship and anxiety with a directness the research could not improve on: I got a bit more confident after I made friends. By Week 5, the field notes record something more remarkable still: students automatically rearranging themselves so that anxious peers were surrounded by supportive classmates — without prompting, and without discussion.

Music education researcher Ailbhe Kenny found, in her own study of children’s musical communities, that fun and enjoyment were the highest-frequency category across her data — referenced forty-one times across nine data sources. She argues, persuasively, that collective joy is not the byproduct of community formation but constitutive of it. The present data tell the same story.

The play of the first weeks — the laughter, the silliness, the games that had no obvious musical justification — was not preparation for the real work. It was the work. It was how a community comes into being.

What peer connection offered

Once the relational foundation was in place, peer connection began to operate as something far more powerful than companionship. It began to function as a resource for the regulation of anxiety itself.

Three mechanisms emerged from the analysis.

Vicarious witness. Watching a peer take a vocal risk - and survive it produced an effect in the other children that no amount of teacher reassurance could replicate. This is the vicarious experience dimension of self-efficacy that the American psychologist Albert Bandura identified decades ago. In this community, it operated quietly and constantly, from the first week, when the willingness of a confident child or two to simply do their thing gave the more hesitant children evidence that the situation was survivable. When one child tried a high note, and the sky did not fall, the others’ belief in their own capacity to try shifted. The community became, in this sense, a continual proof of concept for one another.

Distributed vulnerability. Performance, particularly for an anxious young singer, concentrates the experience of being seen onto a single person. In the community that formed across the eight weeks, vulnerability was spread across the group. When the children stood together to sing, no one body bore the full weight of the audience’s gaze. And the children themselves named this mechanism, independently of one another, from three different angles. When the rest of the kids were also singing with us — that took a lot of the pressure away, Quinn said after the concert. “ Not everyone looking at me, and looking at them as well," said Casey. And Alex wrote it as a caption across a mid-programme drawing: with a group it makes it a lot easier because you are not the only one singing. Three children, three data sources, one perceptual mechanism: the group does not remove the audience — it redistributes the audience’s attention so that no single child is its object.

Sophisticated support delivered without spectacle. Some of the most significant peer-to-peer support across the eight weeks was deliberately quiet. The field notes from Week 5 record one moment in particular. Riley, one of the older children in the group, had her own complex relationship with performance anxiety, including a folded first-interview artefact that the series will return to in Post 14. By Week 5, Riley was using what she had learned about her own breathing to help Casey, the child in the group whose anxiety was most acute, prepare for a moment of performance. The field note records that Riley quietly demonstrated the breathing technique. There was no announcement. No teacher had prompted it. The support was sophisticated enough to know that an ostentatious act of help would have heightened Casey’s self-consciousness rather than relieving it.

The word quietly is doing important work in that field note. Pre-adolescent students are acutely sensitive to peer evaluation. Riley’s discretion reflected something more than kindness. It reflected an accurate, developmentally precise understanding of what Casey actually needed and how to deliver it without making the need visible. That kind of attunement — child to child, in real time is not a small thing.

The double edge of belonging

It would be incomplete to describe peer connection only as a positive force in this community. The data show clearly that peer connection is a double-edged dimension of pre-adolescent musical experience.

The same developmental sensitivity to peers that allows peer support to be powerful also makes peer judgement powerful. Several of the children in this study, during the early weeks, were noticeably more anxious in the presence of the other children than they had been in their individual interviews. My tummy starts to hurt, Alex said. I start to think, what if they don’t like me? What if they don’t like the way my voice sounds? The peers were not yet a support; they were potential evaluators. And the bonds, once formed, were not friction-free: in Week 6, the field notes record visible tension between older and younger students competing for leadership roles as the concert approached — tension that needed the teacher to step in and share the leadership around. A community of this kind is not built once and left running. It is maintained.

What changed across the eight weeks was not the developmental sensitivity itself. The children remained as attuned to peer perception in Week 8 as they had been in Week 1. What changed was their relationship to those peers — what those peers had come to mean. By the later weeks, the children’s heightened awareness of the others’ perceptions was no longer a threat but a form of social knowledge they could rely on. They knew, with some specificity, what each of the others would think — and what they would think had become something other than potential judgement. It had become something closer to support.

This is the developmental story buried in the analysis. Peer sensitivity does not need to be reduced or trained out of children to support them through performance anxiety. It needs the right relational conditions in which to find its better expression.

What the research suggests

When we think about how to support young singers through performance anxiety, the peer community is not a complicating background. It is not a stressor to be managed around. In the right conditions - with the right pedagogical structures, the right pace, the right willingness to let children build relationships before we ask them to take vocal risk- the peer community becomes one of the most powerful instruments for anxiety regulation available to us.

It doesn’t happen automatically. The early weeks of this programme included careful, sustained attention to relationship-building before the rehearsal phase began, and the community’s relational achievements needed tending right through to the concert. The community that supported these children through the performance in Week 8 was not given to them. They built it together inside conditions a teacher was deliberately holding open for them.

But once it had been built, what it offered them — vicarious witness, distributed vulnerability, sophisticated peer support — was something this researcher had not seen described in the literature for this age group.

It is, I think, worth describing carefully. The posts ahead will continue to do that.

The title of this post comes from the song With a Little Help from My Friends by The Beatles.

References

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman.

Barrett, M. S. (2005). Musical communication and children’s communities of musical practice. In D. Miell, R. MacDonald, & D. J. Hargreaves (Eds.), Musical communication (pp. 261–280). Oxford University Press.

Kenny, A. (2014). Practice through partnership: Examining the theoretical framework and development of a “community of musical practice.” International Journal of Music Education, 32(4), 396–408.

Osborne, M. S., Kenny, D. T., & Holsomback, R. (2005). Assessment of music performance anxiety in late childhood. International Journal of Stress Management, 12(4), 312–330.

Tardif, C., Boucher, H., Lane, J., & Barbeau, A.-K. (2024). Music performance anxiety in children 9–12 years old in a music program. Psychology in the Schools, 61(2), 671–685.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.

Further Reading

Creech, A., & Hallam, S. (2011). Learning a musical instrument: The influence of interpersonal interaction on outcomes for school-aged pupils. Psychology of Music, 39(1), 102–122.

Green, L. (2008). Music, informal learning and the school: A new classroom pedagogy. Ashgate.

Yarnold, R. (2024). Singing together, growing confident: Social relationships and music performance anxiety in pre-adolescent voice students. Australian Voice, 25, 57–72.