Yahoo Lifestyle 
Toddler with Down syndrome learns words through music
One mum’s incredibly beautiful video of her daughter singing along with her son has gone viral, after she explained how music helped her Down syndrome toddler learn how to speak.
Utah mum Amanda Bowman Gray shared the clip of her 11-year-old daughter Lydia, playing You Are My Sunshine on her guitar, with 25-month-old Bo chirping in with words along the way.
“My daughter Lydia was watching Bo while I was in the shower,” Amanda captioned the Facebook post.
“Came out to this. If she didn’t have a guitar I don’t know if she would know how to babysit him. This is her go to.
“It’s proof that music therapy works. Bo is 25 months old and has a 12 word vocabulary. Every word he has learned has been through music and singing.”
The video has since been viewed 40 million times, with people around the world falling in love with the adorable duo.
For Amanda and her husband Caleb, who are both musicians, music therapy has played a huge part in their son’s development, after early health troubles saw him in hospital to have heart surgery.
“What most people didn’t know is that my husband and I started practicing the song ‘You are my sunshine’ a month before he had his surgery because we were wanting to perform some tight harmonies at our gigs,” Amanda revealed on Facebook.
“At night we would practice and sing this song while he was in my arms. It was very much routine before his surgery.
“My husband brought the Guitar in and we had one of the nurses record this.
This was the first time that he moved as he reacted to the familiarity of the song and our voices. He was so heavily sedated and wouldn't respond. From then on this has become his theme song. We are firm believers in music therapy!”
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