OK – not EVERY practice session will be pure FUN – in fact I generally try to avoid the use of the word. Some practice sessions, despite the best efforts all around, will be fairly routine, mundane, daily requirements. And, well, most parents of young children playing a musical instrument do find some practice sessions to be downright frustrating. Hopefully those are only occasional though, and I do truly believe in musical development as a loving, bonding, and yes, mostly fun process, with a little loving parental planning.
How to go about setting the conditions for making the difference between a potentially frustrating sequence of regular resistance with little progress and mounting tension versus a loving and enjoyable bonding experience? First, there are many personalities in the world, both children and parents, and each may find a somewhat different variation from the family next door, so in every case there will be some thought needed from individual parents about your own child’s interests, personality, needs, desires, attention span, current strengths and weaknesses. But I believe that with love and attention to your own child, plus a dedication to your child’s overall growth and how music can accentuate that growth, plus patience and planning, your child will flourish as a musician and as a human being through these practice sessions.
Here are some guiding principles for creating the environment for practice sessions that are enjoyable (most of the time!) for young beginners:
1) Practice every day. When there’s too much room for negotiation about WHETHER there will be a practice on a particular day, there’s a clearly implied invitation to battle about whether it’s required on THAT particular day, setting the stage at the outset for a grumpy beginning, or perhaps no practice session at all, perhaps regularly. There may be an occasional exception, or your family may settle into a 6 day-a-week routine, or 5 days can also be ok depending on your family needs, your child’s temperament, etc., but I normally recommend EVERY DAY for young beginners, at least until the routine is well established. Suzuki suggests that the ideal for young beginners is 5 minutes at a time several times a day.
2) Be aware of your child’s needs and interests. At the moment you’re thinking of practicing, is s/he hungry? Tired? Over-scheduled? Has s/he been sitting inside too much today and needs to blow off some steam outside? Thinking about something upsetting that happened during the day? Is s/he in the middle of something that, though it may not appear tremendously important to you, may be terribly important to him/her? Make sure your schedule allows for your child’s basic needs to come first, both in the moment and in your overall plan for each day and the week. For those less easily determined questions, respect your child’s feelings – for my own kids the question “shall we practice right now or shall I set the timer for 10 minutes?” almost always helped to allow them to finish up their own priorities, or give us a chance to check in on some important matter, and start practice on a more positive note (just make sure you do insist on practice when the timer goes off). And if they’re particularly tired or particularly worried about the day’s stresses, maybe that’s a good day for a very short practice – just enough to keep the routine well established without feeling that s/he needs to make notable progress on that particular day.
3) Set the example. With the very youngest children, ages 3 – 4, I start parents first. Parents practice daily before the child has their first lesson. We wait until the child is begging before they’re allowed to begin. In this way, kids see their parents practicing daily and internalize the understanding of the process and how it works, and move easily and naturally into the process. With beginners from age 5 to 8 (or sometimes older), I normally work with parents along with their children. Most commonly I spend most of the lesson time at this age with the kids, and parents become mainly note-takers. But for the first few weeks, parents play right along at lessons, and do practice at home. This can make a huge difference in your child’s understanding and acceptance of the process and interest in practicing. When my kids started piano lessons at ages 3 and 4, all I had to do to get them to practice was to sit down at the piano and start practicing myself. They’d jump right up on the bench and start playing. I’d complain loudly and bitterly about how I never got a chance to practice, and they’d always laugh at me. Only problem was that the argument would then ensue – which kid gets to practice first?
4) Practice games. Ultimately, all musicians need to do a lot of repetition in order to make progress. Kids do not understand, initially, why so many repetitions are needed. In fact, parents most commonly don’t understand the reasons for this repetition, nor the extent of repetition required for optimal progress. Playing a musical instrument is a complex combination of more aspects of training than can really be counted, involving numerous large and fine muscle training elements, in addition to an endless list of thoughts, feelings, aural awareness, and more. No human being can focus the brain on all of these elements at once. The goal is to 1) get clear in your mind on one aspect of musical development; 2) practice that one element enough times to train a set of muscles to be able to perform the task without the full involvement of your brain being necessary for that particular action; and 3) add another layer of awareness/information to your brain; and 4) practice that new level of information enough to ensure that you are able to perform it consistently – again without requiring the continuing full engagement of your brain. We keep adding new layers, and this will continue throughout the life of every musician. If one aspect is not thoroughly and properly ingrained, the next step will be frustrating, and ultimately, at some point, the musician will need to go back and relearn that step. The only way to teach your muscles to take over on their own, and free up your brain for the next level of information, is to practice – and that practice, to be fully productive, must include many repetitions of the task at hand – repetitions that include concentration on the important aspects currently at hand so they are done well and the muscles required learn the task properly. This may sound daunting – and the reality is that it can be a bit overwhelming at times – particularly to guide a young child through this process! This is where practice games come in. A good practice game can be anything that helps your child to visualize that they’re going somewhere with this counting process. (Click here for one example – I’m hoping to post more soon).
Games can help in the following ways:
1) gives kids an incentive to perform the task well, while taking their mind off of the more tedious aspects of the task
2) gives kids an incentive to perform the task many times without thinking about how many are left to go
3) creates an environment that the child will look forward to the next day
4) allows the parent to set the ground rules with high standards – you know what the child needs to do to improve, but they may not be quite so clear, and may not want to listen every day; BUT if they need to follow the direction in order to take the next step in the game, they’ll want to do what you ask
5) turns frustration into fun AND musical progress; transforms a frustrating parent child interaction into a loving and bonding experience
(Note: games per se are not usually needed in the very beginning – with the stretching and rice spitting and head joint sounds, etc. providing a pretty good level of variety and inherently motivating and fun activity for the first couple of weeks, and initial motivation hopefully in full swing. As we work on refining sounds, and more technical parts of tunes, games can come in very handy – perhaps 2-4 weeks into the process. Not every kid needs practice games for optimal progress – there is a very rare child who truly loves to practice for the sake of practice and progress – but I think this is really very rare in our culture. In cultures where music is more ingrained in the child’s daily life, this may not be the case – I think of the musical families and small towns in Ireland, or the singing and drumming in the daily life of some South African tribal cultures, or Mozart’s and Bach’s families and communities – this would be very difficult to duplicate in our culture (though possible easier in some communities), so I see the practice game as a substitute – and one that I hope will lead to a broader music culture in our society for our grandchildren!).
5) Practice rewards and incentives. There are many philosophies about more concrete practice rewards, and while I have used them, I have mixed feelings. I do feel that it’s preferable to avoid them in the beginning with young children, but that there is likely to be a place for them in many families. My basic screening mechanism in deciding to use practice rewards for my own children was to ask myself the question: “Am I giving this as a way to help them understand the process, as a concrete way of measuring and understanding progress, and to help them get over a hump that would be really hard without it and thereby become a happier and more confident person? Or am I using this object to try to manipulate her into doing things the way that I want her to do them in the moment – or to prove something to her teacher?” If I was clear that the answer to the first was yes, and to the second no, then I could forge ahead feeling fine about the choice. If I felt any hint that it was the other way around, I needed to do some soul searching about finding a better way. Sometimes the lines were a little blurred – and when I erred in favor of NOT going the reward route I tended to feel fine about it. When I erred in favor of giving the reward under my self-imposed definition of the “wrong” reasons I normally regretted it. Nothing is more important than your child’s overall well-being as a human. There is no clear line in this question, and one family may make very different choices from another family – and my feeling is that if your choices on this are made with loving thoughtfulness, and fit in with your own family’s life style and other choices, then there are an infinite number of ways of working with the practice reward question that could all be excellent choices. The answer really exists only in the heart of the parent. That having been said, I do believe practice incentives can be useful at times, provided you give clear guidelines for earning the reward, and the reward itself is small (my candy-deprived children at ages 8 or 9 would do 20 repetitions for a single natural foods equivalent of the M&M; it was only when they were 10 or so that we worked our way up to 100 repetitions for a dollar store item – the stakes do get higher as they get older – so do start VERY SMALL – and for us it didn’t start much at all before age 8 or so. The goal should be more focused on the accomplishment of the task than on the size of the reward – though obviously the reward must be appealing).
6) The pillow fight. My younger daughter went through a stage where many practice sessions ended with both of us frustrated. A good old-fashioned pillow fight allowed us to have something to look forward to even when things didn’t seem to be going well, to vent our frustration, move on with the day having laughed together, and to start with a clearer slate for the next day’s practice.
Bottom line: don’t take yourself too seriously, enjoy your amazing miracle of a child in whatever ways work at the moment, respect your child and help them to respect you, and allow your love for your child and your interest in helping her/him grow as a thoughtful, compassionate, loving, responsible and happy human being, to guide you through this journey together.
