Why Practice?

Should a child be made to practice?  As with everything, views differ.

Some parents see music education as an opportunity for kids to learn discipline and time management in addition to the music itself.  Others hold that learning music shouldn’t involve any pressure, either because it contradicts the spirit of the activity or because they just don’t have the time or energy to enforce one more thing.   Some parents’ goal is to have their children stay in lessons until they become a proficient musician.  Others are content to expose their offspring to music and see what comes of it.

Which approach is best?

In my experience, both approaches can be effective, depending upon the child.   Both can also fail miserably, depending upon the child. However, I believe a child has a better chance of learning to play and eventually enjoying the instrument if some sort of practice routine is introduced.

Because…

•   Although a child may stop lessons after a couple of years, it’s a shame if  they never progress during that time.   Even a brief stint in lessons should show them they are capable of learning music.  If they want to come back to it later on,  they should remember it as something at which they were successful.  Also, they’ll have two years—or six months, or whatever length of time they studied—of skills on which to build.

•   Self-expression usually comes later.   We sometimes make the mistake of believing beginning music lessons are a vehicle of artistic expression. Occasionally they may be, but more often they are putting in place the building blocks for later artistry.   We don’t teach a first-grader how to add and expect him to immediately be able to find a polynomial.  We teach him to add with the understanding that it is the first of many steps that will lead to solving complex equations.  In other words, the good stuff takes a few years; learning music is a gift that sits under the tree for a while.

•   Lessons cost money and parents should get their money’s worth.  When a teacher has to go over the same material week after week, a parent gets less value for their music education dollar.

•   When a student practices, they progress.  When they progress, they learn new pieces, finish books, and  understand more of what they see on the page.  Accomplishment feels good.   This is sometimes what well-meaning parents miss when they don’t push practicing because they want to keep music “fun.”   It’s not fun to do something poorly. It is fun to be able to play a piece that impresses your friends.

All that said, I have heard accounts of  students who for years rarely touched their instrument outside of lessons and yet enjoyed the lessons so much their parents let them continue, until one day the student took it upon themselves to start practicing and then never stopped.   (In fact, we have a teacher with that story.) And sometimes a child gets enough out of the weekly lesson time itself to make continuing worthwhile.   The lessons may still be enriching even if they don’t result in a high degree of proficiency; in some cases, gaining expertise isn’t necessarily the goal.

But I believe most parents put their child in lessons with the hope and expectation that they’ll learn to play.  And rarely does a child stop music lessons because they just couldn’t abide their 20-minute-a-day practice regimen.   Mostly they stop because they so seldom sit down to practice that they’re not learning to play, and so it gradually becomes less important to both them and their parents.   And, the vast majority of our advanced students throughout the years have had a practice routine dictated to them, at least at the beginning.

Practicing for lessons can give children insight into how to tackle something big by breaking it into smaller steps.  It familiarizes them with the emotional trajectory of facing something new:  the initial uncertainty, perhaps some frustration, then focus, persistence, work, understanding, more work, and finally, mastery.   This may end up being  at least as great a gift as the music itself.