How To Be Successful With Your Child on a Musical Instrument
Have you just started lessons with your child? Have you been practicing with them for a while but things aren’t going so well? Are you thinking about signing your child up for lessons but unsure about whether or not you can do it? These rules are essential to having your child succeed with their musical path, and creating a good relationship between you, your child, and music. Being the parent of a musical child takes commitment, hard work, and carving out time in your daily busy life. But it is completely doable if you approach it with the right mindset, and remembering these simple tips.
1. Put. Your. Phone. Away. Step 1 is starting with showing your child you are there for them, with no distractions. Its about proving to your child that there is nothing more important in the world to you in those 30 minutes of practice every day than them. It is about showing them that whether they are struggling or achieving, you are there to support them and love them through it. If you have that trust, if you have that practice of showing up for them, if you have that one on one communication free of all distractions, you are then prepared for whatever may come your way.
The Suzuki Method is about setting up the Suzuki Triangle (Teacher, Child, Parent Relationship) for success. We have to remember that this is not a Suzuki Square, adding in our phone to the picture.
However, in this day and age, we can use technology for our benefit, and if you do this properly, you will not tarnish the relationship with your child by taking out your phone. If you are using your phone to take pictures, videos, or notes in the lesson, then when you take it out to practice, the crucial part of the puzzle here is that you share your phone screen with your child. You are looking at the picture together. You watch the video from the lesson together. You read your notes out loud to your child and make them a part of your thought process. You talk through what you are seeing with your child, you say things like “lets try making that adjustment together to make it look more like the picture” or “do you remember that from the lesson? Lets try that together”.
Things NOT to do:
Do NOT keep your phone screen to yourself and bury your face in your phone and try to figure out the puzzle by yourself.
Do NOT make your child stand there waiting in rest position while you quickly just read that text from your friend because it just might be an emergency, even though you were on your way to look at the lesson notes.
Do NOT keep your phone screen open after you’ve finished looking at the lesson notes together— turn the screen off, put it face down, and off to the side. The attention should be back on your child.
Most parents these days are working, tirelessly busy, and running around with a thousand things bouncing around in their heads. Use practice time as sacred time with your child— time for you to rest and enjoy time with your child, time for you to show them during practice all the things that you want to be as a parent; loving, supportive, there for them, helping them through the good times and the bad, etc. If you want your child to be successful with music, they need to first feel like you have their back while they learn something pretty difficult!
2. Show up, and make it a habit. Would you make your child try to learn to read by themselves? No, there’s no sense in trying to let them practice or learn a musical instrument by themselves— not only is it a whole different language, but it also includes the physical, mental, and emotional bodies. Practicing and playing a musical instrument requires physical awareness, mental stamina and focus, and is emotionally exhausting.
If your child is younger, say between the ages of 3 and 7 or so, try these exercises or think about these examples:
-Have your child write their name. Watch how they hold the pen, and how it looks nothing like how you might. And even if they do have a good grip, watch how long it takes for them to write their name. And even if they can write fairly fast, watch how the curves of the lines are not as fluid as yours are. These things take time, they take practice, and help.
-Next time you watch TV or a movie, notice how long the camera stays in one shot before switching to the next thing. I don’t mean scenes, I mean before it switches views, or switches to something else, or brings your focus to a different character, object, or anything else. Count how many seconds it takes before the shot changes. The average camera shot is 3 seconds. Read that again—3 seconds. We are constantly teaching our brains to only focus for 3 seconds. And if your child is watching movies, TV shows, YouTube Clips, or playing games on their iPad, they are wiring their brains from the start to only focus for 3 seconds. Now, on a musical instrument, it is expected that they focus for 30 min on average. Should you expect them to be able to focus for 30 minutes on their own? No. Practice is about helping them with that focus and re-wiring their brain to focus for longer periods of time.
-When your child hurts themselves climbing a tree, when they fell down and scraped their knee, or when their friend hurt their feelings, what is the first thing they do? They probably run to you. They are seeking comfort, help, sympathy, and are trusting you to make it better. If they are practicing, and it gets hard, and they all the sudden have little 5 year old feelings of self doubt, incompetence, frustration, or have the inability to figure out how to move forward, they need your help. Practicing will not go well if you aren’t there to show them how to work through those emotional feelings.
Do not expect your child to do it on their own, and don’t expect for it to all come at once. Musical instruments challenge all parts of our being, and is a very difficult task—but with high reward. Be there for them, show up, make it a habit, and create space for your child.
3. Set Your Practice Rules and Habits Right From the Bat. Here are some good rules to start:
-Check your instrument or the child for anything that needs to be done BEFORE practice starts— for example, cut fingernails, sticky fingers, bow rosined, etc. If you have things that you might need during practice, such as tissues for your congested child, have them nearby and ready so that practice gets minimally disturbed.
-Take a bow to signal your practice start time, and end with a bow to signal your practice end time. This helps to start and stop the clock, and create space for your work.
-No snacks during practice, unless if used for practice motivation. This helps to eliminate distraction.
-Always start with the easy things (DO YOUR REVIEW!), and start practice with encouragement, positivity, support, and love. Never start a practice with the hardest thing, and jump right into criticism.
-Stick to the formula of language— Genuine and Specific Positive Feedback + [“We or Us” Activity + Constructive Help] + Physical or Visual Signal of Love and Respect = Efficient Happy Practicing
Violin Example: “Wow Suzie, the thing I loved most about your Twinkle was that you kept your gorgeous bow hold the entire time! Do you remember when we worked so hard on that a couple months ago? I bet if we work just as hard on keeping your bow straight, we will get that too, and I can’t wait to hear how gorgeous your sound will be then! Let’s give it a shot (Help with setting violin up ready for practice, and a smile).
-Have a specific time of day to practice. Its like an appointment! What is even better is if you can make practice time the same time as your lesson time. If your lesson is at 4, make your practice time at 4. If thats not possible, thats fine, just try to keep your practice time of day consistent. The more your child knows that right after school time is practice time, the less argument or fight back there will be since they know its coming and its what is expected.
-Have a designated practice space. Have everything set up and ready. If you are feeling a rut in your practice, try changing up the practice location. But, in general, keeping a consistent space is helpful for knowing what is about to come.
These rules all promote one key ingredient— consistency! Creating successful practice is all about creating consistency. Children like structure, and do well with knowing their boundaries. You can always have fun and do different things to switch up your practice, but these boundaries help to make practice into a habit.
4. Trust your teacher for the musical things, don’t pretend like you are the teacher at home, and know your child better than anyone. Do not try to be the teacher— that goes for in the lesson, and at home. Your child understands the Suzuki Triangle, and knows very well that you are not their teacher. At home, make sure that you are approaching practice from a standpoint of “Your teacher said to do this” and that you are not the expert. Your child wants to feel like that musical instrument is their thing, and it is! Even if you did play the same instrument as them growing up, do not project that onto them. Music is hard, and your child most likely wants you to understand that its hard too, and to appreciate their efforts. Trust your teacher, do as the teacher says, and your job is to be the parent. Yes, at home, you are the “teacher” but you are still the parent! And that is the most important job of all. You have to understand your child better than anyone else, to not only help your child, but to also help your teacher! The better you try to read your child, you put yourself in your child’s shoes, and communicate with your teacher, the more success you can have.
I grew up as a Suzuki Violin Child myself, and my mom is a vocalist. She is a well trained musician, but knows nothing about violin. This came with its own colorful palette of pro’s and con’s. She could always tell if I was out of tune, but she didn’t really understand fingerboard geography and how I knew where to put my fingers. She knows what beautiful violin playing should sound like on the most refined level, but had no idea how to really physically achieve it. She could accompany us on all of our review songs, read music, understood rhythm and could sing perfectly in tune and in key for me to learn all of my songs perfectly, but didn’t understand the struggle of playing music on a very delicate and challenging instrument like the violin.
One day, I was practicing something on the violin, and I just couldn’t get it. She made a comment about how I just needed to do it this way and just like this and I got so frustrated and yelled “violin isn’t easy you know! YOU want to try?! I bet you can’t!!” She realized in that moment that I needed her to understand how hard it was, and that she didn’t know all the answers and that I was actually the violinist, and knew what it was like to have to do something so hard. She took my violin, and with complete failure, attempted to play. It not only humbled her, but made us laugh so hard that it luckily repaired the situation.
You are the PARENT. You are not the teacher, and you are not the instrumentalist taking lessons. The parent job is the hardest, unfortunately, but always remember that your job is about placing trust in the teacher, and having your child place their trust in you.
5. Alternate between a wide camera lens, and a smaller lens. When you take pictures of your child, do you take pictures only of them? Sure! But you also love pictures of them plus their different toys they have or different activities that they are doing, and you also love pictures of them with other people, and you also love pictures of them in different locations. Yes, the close up pictures are special and important, but its also important to widen your lens.
Your daily practicing should be your small lens— it should be the close ups, the focus on the small details, the beauty of practicing just one thing. But don’t forget about the wider lens— where will they be a year from now? What about 10 years from now? Do you want them to be the best instrumentalist they can be or do you want them to be someone that learned life skills from their instrument? Which life skills do you feel are most important to learn? Organization, discipline, problem solving skills, hard work, focus, genuine curiosity, physical/mental/emotional awareness, patience, etc?
We tend to get stuck in one type of lens or the other. But it is important that we remember why we signed our child up for lessons in the first place. Sure, they were interested, maybe they even begged you to play (like I did with my mom!). But you saw the long term value in learning an instrument, and you decided that that was best for your child. Keep yourself alternating between the big picture and the daily grind, and your child will learn how to attain their goals in a healthy and beautiful way.
If these helped, please share and like this post! The more other musical parents know about things like this, the more successful our next generation of learners will be. As Pablo Casals said, “Perhaps it is music that will change the world”.