Radford music professors explain how they write catchy children’s songs everyone will love

If you’re a parent of a young child who loves singing and bopping along to playful melodies, consider yourself lucky to have the dynamic musical duo of Jennifer McDonel Rivers and David Rivers on your side, producing catchy – and educational – tunes that everyone in your family, not just your kids, can enjoy.

McDonel Rivers, a professor and Radford’s associate dean for the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and David Rivers, an associate professor of music and director of the university’s music business and commercial music program, recently spoke to the “With Good Reason” public radio program about their songwriting process, explaining how they make music that supports early childhood education and while making it enjoyable for kids and adults.

Once you listen to the collection of children’s songs and albums the two Radford University music faculty members have created over the years, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll find yourself moving and grooving, just like your child, with their songs throughout the day, no matter where you are. In the car. In the park. On the beach. Anywhere.

Careful. It’s easy to get songs like “Animals on the Train” and “Oranges” stuck in your head.

“Bahm bahm bahm, here we go,” you’ll sing as you’re driving to your child’s preschool. That’s how McDonel Rivers begins each song she pens, setting up a musical context for children, she explained. What follows are lyrics designed to foster the cognitive, social, emotional and physical development of their young listeners.

“One of the main goals in writing our children’s music,” McDonel Rivers explained, “is to increase the music listening vocabulary of young children by creating songs in many tonalities, meters and musical styles.”

Once the lyrics are composed by David and me, he “breathes life into my two-minute songs,” McDonel Rivers said of her partner’s ability to add his musical touch to each song.

The musical duo employs research-based learning trajectories in early math, science, literacy and music as the basis for the songs. Their music is part of the duo’s Little Beats children’s music education project, which began as a collaboration with Zero To Three, a national nonprofit that supports cognitive development in babies and toddlers.

Many of their songs include homages and references to popular music.

“We’ll drop little Easter eggs in our songs that a parent might recognize, but the kid’s not going to know until probably later. We’ll have a Prince-esque guitar part in there [a song],” Rivers explained. “Our friends will ask, ‘Hey, did you purposely put that thing in there that sounds like ‘Ice Ice Baby?’ Yeah, that was on purpose.”

Listen carefully to the song “Seeds” and, if you’re a fan of ’80s rock, you’ll likely detect “a direct homage,” as “With Good Reason” host Matt Darroch noted, to an Eddie Van Halen guitar riff. As Rivers’s guitar kicks in, you almost expect to hear Diamond David Lee Roth vocalizing the sight of heat coming off the road, but instead it’s McDonel Rivers singing, “Now pretend you’re a seed in the ground.”

In the episode entitled “Baby Brains and Little Beats,” listeners learn how the couple first became interested in music at a young age – Jennifer’s grandmother played piano and organ, while David’s father was a classical pianist – and how the two transitioned from colleagues and friends to spouses.

“Did you guys fall in love when you were producing music together?” Darroch asked.

“I guess you could say so,” McDonel Rivers replied. “We were friends and colleagues for many years, then we just became more than that.”

The Rivers’ radio interview can be heard on the “With Good Reason” website as well as Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can read more about their research in the spring 2026 issue of The Magazine of Radford University.

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