Does this sound familiar? You're ready to start practice with your child and call them into the practice room only to be met with stalling, complaints, or even arguing? Your child seems to enjoy playing their instrument but it's an ordeal to get them to start practicing every day. (You can read last week's article about resisting practice HERE) It's hard to make daily practice a routine when we know it's going to involve a battle of wills to get…
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If your child is resisting practice at home, you may be worried that they don’t want to keep learning their instrument. It may seem like a sign that they don’t want to continue lessons. While that may be true for some students, if your child likes other parts of playing their instrument: going to lessons, playing with other students, and recitals for example, that likely isn’t the case.
Your child can love to play their instrument and dislike practice at the same time.
They can resist practice everyday but still love to play their instrument.
Practice is a discipline and it takes a lot of mental energy.
Practice is a learned skill.
If we say to our children “go practice” they don’t even know what that is.
At least until we’ve taught them how.
I hear questions from parents all the time asking if they should stop taking lessons because their child doesn’t want to practice unless they remind them, or because they are resistant to getting started practicing.
This is normal.
Nearly every student I have ever taught has gone through this.
Sometimes I still go through it today, and I know many other professionals do too.
Life is busy, we have a lot to do and a lot vying for our attention and getting started is hard.
It’s also important to know that starting practice without a reminder is more a function of personality and being a self-starter at things in general, than an expression of loving music.
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The journey of parenting a child who is learning music from a young age into their teen years and beyond is one too
For those of us who are involved in the day to day practice with young children, we know that it takes a great amount of commitment and effort to keep moving forward.
We may ask ourselves “Will I always have to practice with my child?”
Your child has to be a willing participant but you are the one powering forward (and even helping them become a willing participant).
Progress feels slow sometimes.
You, as the parent, can get tired and wonder if it’s worth doing.
You wonder if it’s worth it.
But also, there are great times to be had if we enjoy the time together and enjoy the process.
Your child won’t always need you to carry practice along this way.
There are often focus and attention issues in practice with young children when they are first starting to learn an instrument. Often students naturally build their ability to focus over time but, sometimes students are struggling with a bigger issue of ADHD which makes the focus needed to practice difficult for everyone involved.
The tips I am going to share below may help any child learning to focus for longer periods of time.
For students with ADHD they will likely need strategies like these to be able to practice for any significant length of time.
When I was a young teacher a mother came to my studio with her son and said their former teacher would not work with him any longer because he was struggling in lessons due to ADHD (this was 15 years ago and I think there were far fewer resources and far less accessible information for teachers at this time).
She brought me a sheet of paper with the symptoms listed and asked me to read them and tell her if I was willing to try to work with him.
And there spelled out in black and white was a long list of characteristics that I could have written myself if someone asked me to make a list of all the things that frustrated me about myself.
It literally made my eyes well up with tears because I really realized for the first time that these things were not character flaws, they were due to how my brain functioned.
When I was young girls were not usually diagnosed with ADHD – especially the inattentive type. Instead my parents were told I wasn’t working up to my potential, my desk and locker were an inexplicably disorganized mess, and though I seemed to be doing my homework it just wasn’t making it back into school.
Being Diagnosed with ADHD in my 20’s was actually a relief to me because once I knew that I was struggling with something specific, I could learn to use strategies to work with myself and use my creative brain to my advantage instead of fighting myself all the time.
Whether your child uses medication or not, helping them learn the skills to navigate life with their unique, fast paced brain is important.
I credit the structure and creativity involved in music with helping me do just that.
I meet people every week who tell me they wish they hadn’t stopped playing an instrument when they were younger.
Usually they stopped playing during the middle or high school years. This is when life gets busy and it’s hard to keep going with the instrument unless it’s a big priority in the family or there is a good social outlet for music by that age (more on that in a future article!)
If we value learning music as a part of our family’s culture and as an activity we want our children to grow up with long term the groundwork for being able to, and wanting to, stick with it long term is built for most students during the grade school years.
Working with the developmental stage our children and students are at as they approach the instrument is so important.
Without keeping this in mind we can get into all kinds of power struggles and difficulties that might be avoided with a little more perspective about what children at this age need.
The Center for Parenting Education has a great article outlining the basic developmental skills being developed at this age (read the article HERE).
The article has great suggestions about how to encourage emotional and cognitive development at this age. I’m going to share some of them below with my own thoughts about how they apply to studying a music instrument. (The headlines in bold below come from the article).
When we keep our children’s development in mind as we practice and work with these big tasks they are learning at this age, we are much more likely to be successful long term!
Research shows that when we praise our children for their effort on a task they will work harder on such tasks in the future. Praising for “talent” or how smart they are really has the opposite effect. As parents we help students this age best when we notice the effort they are putting in and encourage it. Even if there is just a little bit of initiative and they are willing to keep trying when something isn’t easy right away, this is huge. Praise the effort!
How do we start practice? Especially with young children, getting started is easily the hardest part.. This is even true for me as an adult.
There are countless things that get in the way of getting starting. Often the hardest part is leaving one activity, that we’re already engaged with, and getting started concentrating on something new.
I hear from my own students that they are always glad when they have practiced, but that getting started is often a challenge. One way to help smooth the transition is to start (and end for that matter!) each practice with something fun. Get your child engaged in the process without doing something more challenging right away. In effect, this eases them into the mindset and mode of practice.
This can involve flipping a coin, rolling dice, or creating an audience out of stuffed animals. The game doesn’t have to be elaborate but the element of surprise and novelty can catch your child’s interest and get them excited to get started.
Research actually shows that children who kept a steady beat and moved together with adults to music exhibited more cooperative behavior afterwards. Use this to your advantage and find some music to play with a steady beat (most children’s music would work great) and find the beat together. You can keep the beat on your knees, head or on the floor.
This post is second in a series about Preschool Age Students. You can read the first article here: Secrets to Successful Practice With Preschoolers. Often when we practice an instrument daily with our preschool age child it can be hard to see any progress at all. Progress is often happening, but it ca be very slow and gradual . As a teacher who only sees students once a week, I often notice the week to week improvements more than parents…
There are many great reasons to learn an instrument as young as the Preschool years including: a child that shows interest, time to practice as part of the routine before school & homework begin, and that students this age are at a developmental stage where music will become part of who they are, just as learning their native language will be. A big key to a student's success at this age is for parents to know that they have a…
Thanks to readers in the Suzuki Triangle Community for sharing your ideas and helping this list take shape! See which rule didn’t make the cut at the end of the list!
This is the time of year when it’s easy to get focused on the new year coming up.
We tend to take stock of the year: What were our goals this year? What did we accomplish? What are our goals for the coming year?
It’s a process I love and encourage you to try.
But today I want to talk about something else.
Something that we can lose sight of in the shuffle of all the holidays and all the reflecting we do this time of year.
There are still 33 days left of this year at the time I am writing this article. That’s just over 9% of the year that’s still left.
33 days is plenty of time to: improve a skill, complete a month long practice challenge, or prepare for an upcoming performance. There is still time to make real progress before the year is over and finding a fun way to keep momentum going is really important during this busy time of year.
It’s too early to throw in the towel and decide we’ve accomplished all that we’re going to this year.