Parenting tips and tricks: How to Get Your Child to Practice For Their Music Lessons

Oh how quickly it turned from…

Son: “Mom please can I get a guitar!! Please Please Please I want to learn guitar.”

Me: “Okay but you will have to practice like every day to make taking lessons productive.”

Son: “I will I promise, it is going to be awesome! I love you I love you thank you mommy.”

Cute little boy playing guitar on brick wall background

(3 weeks later)

Me: “Time to practice guitar”

Son: “But I am soooo tired.”

Me: “You have to practice so you can get really good”

Son: “But I just don’t feel good….I had a bad day….I just got home…I need to play for a while…” Shrill whine

Me: “It only takes a few minutes and you are getting so much better already.”

Son: “Can I do it after dinner….right before bath….tomorrow…a year from tomorrow.”

Me: “Why are we even paying for lessons? I thought you wanted to do this.”

Son: “I do just _______.”

You get the picture. It is pretty miserable to fight this fight. You get to pay for lessons that they asked to take then you get to drive them there…then you get to fight with them every day to practice. I have no great tip or trick that magically makes it all better. I wish i did. If you do I am all ears! Please share. I have tried many things over the past 9 months and I have read the suggestions of many.

It all boils down to the impatience of childhood. Sure he wants to learn guitar but what he means by that is that he wants to be a rock star in 2 weeks time. Learning music is hard work! It takes time, perseverance, and concentration. If it were easy we would all know how to play guitar like the greats.

child plays on piano lesson of the music

Ok so this is my approach:

Desire: Make sure that the child is playing an instrument that they have expressed a strong interest in playing. Learning music is such an astounding commitment. When you combine the commitment required with the amount of time it takes to develop the skill and a lack of interest in the final achievement you are in for a daily battle. At no point has my kiddo said that he does not want learn guitar–he really wants to learn it by osmosis as he sleeps.

2. Routine: The best way to eliminate the procrastination strategies is to have the practice regimen firmly entrenched in your daily routine. Wherever you place it in your day be it right after school, right after dinner, first thing in the morning keep it there. This has been a huge challenge for me because I did not want one more thing that was rigidly placed int he days schedule. But not keeping it firm opened me up to waaaay more avoidance and complaint. Do yourself a favor and do not follow that path. If a child just comes to accept that the routine is dinner, wash up, practice, then free time they are likely to spend much less time arguing to practice at another time like after they watch TV or just before bed.

3. Consistency: I learned this one the hard way too. At first I thought, ah well he is so young, and I don’t want to burn him out so I will give him days off here and there, it is no big deal. That just opens you up to all sorts of debates about can I just skip today (even when he had skipped the last 2 days), can I do it tomorrow or how about next month? Build it in strong and firm from the get go! If you have to fight it back into the routine it is possible but it is harder for everybody, and by that I mean especially for you.

4. Built in breaks: Build in a day off a week so that the child knows that they do get a break.

5. Incentives: Bribery or reward however you look at it. A child is detached from a future in which they are a concert pianist or rock star. Learning music is a discouraging process along the way. Solid efforts are met with mechanized nonmelodic playing. It is such a slow growth process (unless you have a prodigy–but then you probably are not reading this in the first place.)

My Incentive Program: A penny a day. Each day of full productive practice a penny is given to place into a jar. When that jar has 16 pennies in it that represents a bit more than a couple weeks worth of practicing. In my house the current reward is a trip to get frozen yogurt. This works for us because well, quite honestly I would probably take them for frozen yogurt about that much anyway. Because of this reward system frozen yogurt has been transformed from an any time we feel like it treat to an earned reward only. You can replace this with whatever you want. I find that for young children an incentive more than 2 weeks out is too distant to hold motivation. I find a weekly reward to be too demanding on our schedule, and to be too frequent to maintain it’s desire. The reward should really be something that you are willing to not give them outside of this incentive program. So, if you go to McDonald’s every Thursday then McDonald’s is not a good incentive choice, unless you are ready to stop going to McDonald’s except when this 16 coin goal is achieved. If they begin to tire of the reward change it. Maybe come Winter it will be fresh chocolate chip cookies every 16 successful practices.

This strategy has greatly improved the process of getting my kiddo to practice his guitar. One day when he is rocking out and playing guitar he will thank me for hounding him to keep investing his time and focus into this amazing life long skill.

Good Luck!