Developing Good Habits

If you want your child to learn to play a musical instrument, any instrument, they will simply have to practise. There are a few lucky children (and parents!) out there, who love to practise. They have a passion for playing, and will happily play for hours on end, forsaking TV, computers, socialising with friends, food, bathroom breaks, because they don't want to put that instrument down.

If you have one of those children, you can stop reading now. This post is not for you. This post is for the other 99.9% of the population whose children don't always want to practise as much as they should if they seriously want to play well. And most kids do want to play well. Children get a great deal of pleasure from learning and mastering new skills. They love to receive praise and acknowledgement of their proud performances. However children are creatures of the moment. Given the choice they will choose the thing that looks more enticing now and practice never does seem to look more enticing than TV.

One way to tackle this difficulty is to set up good habits. Despite the fact that other things are more enticing, children still manage to get up, washed, dressed, breakfasted and off to school in the morning. The reason they do this is because we as parents have instilled that habit in them. And the same can apply to practice. A child may not want to or feel like practising, but they will (with perhaps a prompt or two) because that's the habit that they're in.

So, how to set up good habits?

Time of day can be very important. If a child always practises at five o'clock, it will expect to, and even (sometimes, if you're lucky!) want to practise at five o'clock. Like brushing your teeth, if the habit is strong enough, it can feel strange if you don't do it.

Making practice part of the daily ritual is a similar but slightly different concept. Sometimes family life doesn't allow for a set time to practise. This is true in our household. My son practises in the mornings on weekends and holidays because it's a better time of day for him, but we can't manage this all week. So instead we have practise mentally listed as one of the things to do before we relax and do whatever we like. For me it might be housework and washing, for my son it's homework and practice.

Incorporate a reward into the habit in order to reinforce it. My son gets a sweet when he's finished. The idea is that he makes a positive association with the habit and anticipates completing it.

Involve the whole family.  If the child has a sense that their practise is part of their family's everyday life, they will be much more likely to accept the need to do it. My family is aware that practice time is important and they won't try to interrupt with other concerns while it's in progress.

Chart the habit. We have a table on A4 paper that we complete with stickers or stamps across each day of the week. At the end of the week it goes into a folder and we start a new table. I try to jazz it up with pictures and involve my son in deciding what goes in as his practice goals. Over the years we've built up quite an extensive paper record of all the hard work he's done, and, importantly, a visual record of the habit, adding to his impression of its permanence in his life.

Of course, there will always be times when it isn't possible to practise. Perhaps you or your child is ill, or you're on holiday with no instrument available to use. If good habits have been set up, it is much, much easier to return to regular practice after these hiccups.

Then there will also always be times when you or your child is in a foul mood and is refusing to practise. I'll talk about how I deal with these times in my next post.

After school practice

This is the time of day most children practise, in my experience. As I was saying before, lengthening practice time pushed us into the after-school slot. I decided that freedom to practise for as long as he wanted or needed to had the advantage over the better energy levels available in the mornings. Plus, there was no need to wake my son up before he was ready to wake. (We're normally an alarm-free household. We aren't the types to sleep on past the need for it, and if we go to bed at the right time we'll wake up at around the right time in the mornings.) So if my son needed to sleep to 8 o'clock rather than 7.30, then I wouldn't have to wake him up in order to practise.

We started practice time in the afternoons about 18 months ago I think. Of course, nothing is ever perfect. What we lost in pressure to fit practice into a defined time, we gained in level of tiredness. Now he had the time to take his time, so to speak, some evenings, it has to be said, he really wants to get the whole thing over with as fast as possible. He's just too tired or emotional after a long school day to really enjoy his practice or get anything out of it.

Three nights out of five, my son goes to an after school club, where he plays constantly for about an hour and a half. Practice after these days can be particularly hard. I've learned to allow him 15-20 minutes after he gets home to have something to eat, read for a while and generally calm down before he does his practice. Walking in off the street and sitting down in a peaceful and focused frame of mind is just about impossible for him. At the same time, he knows that practice is imminent because, while I'm free and available to help at that time, I make the family dinner when he's finished.

However, nothing other than reading and eating is allowed between coming home and starting practice. While we are creatures of habit, paradoxically we also tend to not want to do something because we know we're supposed to do it. We derive comfort from routines, but we also get sick of them. If my son were to begin another activity before practice, it would be twice as hard for him to stop that and start his practice than if he were doing nothing at all. So there is no TV on, no computer on, nothing to distract him (or me!), and that makes starting so much easier.

To summarise, practising after school has been made easier for us by

• Allowing some time to readjust to the calmer home environment
• Ensuring basic needs are met - food, drink, toilet
• Ensuring distractions such as TVs, computers or video games do not compete for the child's attention
• Freeing up the parent guide from other tasks
• Having a roughly set time to start

At the weekends, and during the holidays, we still do morning practice. For my son, as long as there's no time constraint, he simply focuses better in the mornings, and he knows that once practice is done, he has the day free to do whatever else he wants with his time.

Whether morning or after school practice, we've found that setting particular times of day for this has been very beneficial. In my next post I'll talk about developing good habits.

Practice timing

One of our problems with piano practice is the timing. No, we don't need a metronome! My son's piano teacher has always advocated practising in the morning before school. This makes a lot of sense. Many children are at their brightest in the morning after a good night's sleep. Also, because it is a set time of day where activities must follow a fairly strict schedule, it's easier to set up good habits by practising in the mornings. Like brushing your teeth, if practice is embedded well enough into the morning ritual, it can feel wrong if it isn't done.

However, morning practice won't work for us. It was fine when my son was doing 15 minutes a day, just a little tinkle and a Twinkle, but now with practice time lasting about 45 minutes on average, it's expanded into something a little too unwieldy to slot between getting dressed and having breakfast.

Then, of course, there is the noise factor. Pianos do have muffle peddles, but I can't understand the point of practising if you can't hear yourself. Here I have to confess that we're a late-sleeping household, or at least some of us are. While other family members could tolerate a brief 15 minute interruption to their restful slumber, a whole 45 minutes would rob them of their ability to get back to sleep and result in some grumps for the rest of the day.

Another problem I found was that morning practice means we can't take our time over things. My son's enthusiasm for practice waxes and wanes. It would be a shame, on those days when he wants to spend 10 minutes just improvising, to tap my watch and tell him to hurry up or be late for school. And if he wants or needs to spend a few more minutes to work something out, it wouldn't be productive to cut that process short.

So on school days, practice is scheduled to happen after school. Problem solved? Or course not. After school practice brings its own problems, which I shally discuss in my next blog.

Performing the repertoire

If it's Sunday then it's repertoire day. Rather than Twinkles, scales, composition, reading, review, polishing and learning, on Sundays we do concert (supposedly) standard performance and reading only. It's important that each piece is performed as many times as possible, but if my son were to play each piece that he knows every day, that would take up a lot of practice time. So instead we review three pieces a day in a lucky dip, and all the pieces once a week. The aim in review is to put into practice all the polishing points we know. Sometimes it happens, sometimes my son is clearly thinking about Sonic. We can but try.

Today was not such a good repertoire performance. We made the mistake of rushing off to see Grandma before doing piano time. When we got back, my son was burning to play with his best friend, our neighbour's little boy, and I wanted to get some gardening done during the brief midwinter daylight hours. So  performance was required after extracting the boy from the neighbour's house where he'd got hyped up through playing computer time.

It's been my experience that the best way to handle outrage and grumps is to ignore them. This generally works for us, and it's nice to see my son's mood alter as playing progresses, as long as I don't exacerbate the situation by offering comment. By the end of the repertoire he is almost bouncy again, and is thinking (somewhat) about what he's playing and trying (somewhat) to play well.

For reading we're working on page 46 of Methode Rose. This is a rather difficult rhythm to play - a kind beat and a half followed by half a beat. My poor son has struggled and has taken literally weeks over this page but he's finally getting there. We clap the rhythm first, then sing it, then he plays each hand separately, then finally together. Again and again the original rhythm became lost when he tried to put his hands together, but we have nearly cracked it for all the songs on the page. Hooray!

Eeeek! First Post

My piano-learning son is the last of my three children and I'm trying to get this one right. Despite twenty-one years of child rearing I've yet to discover what 'right' is exactly, but I have a theory that if you can give your child skills in another language, a sport and some musical ability by the time they break free of your clutches, you will at least have tried to do a good job. This is where the piano lessons come in.

I had a friend who told me about Suzuki musicianship, where the child starts to learn from an early age and as my background is in language teaching this made a lot of sense to me. There are lots of advantages to starting young. As I see it, the younger the brain the easier it is for it to learn something, the habit of practice can be set up so that the child can't remember a time that they didn't do it and so will (hopefully!) put up less of a fuss, and the earlier the child starts the greater their achievement at a young age. A sense of achievement is so important to us all and children are no different. Plus, the child is further along the road to 10,000 hours of meaningful practice. I will write more on this later, but it is interesting that finally research is catching up with Suzuki's theory that talent is present in every child, and that the only thing that separates the ordinary child from the prodigy is practice.

Hmmm......I'm starting to sound like a pushy mum who needs her little darling to be the best in everything. Not so. Like most parents, I'm trying to give my son as many options as I can. If he gives up at age 15, that's fine, that'll be his choice. It won't change the fact that he will have gained tremendously from the experience.

So, at the grand age of four we embarked on this journey together. He was getting a little ancient for Suzuki method by then (yes, really!) but we seem to be doing okay. It's been a wonderful and traumatic experience. At times I have been filled with joy, at other times I've been weeping over my computer in the early hours of the morning.

I will post more on the last three years as these blogs progress, as well as record our current progress, our experiences, and our reactions, and hopefully too post useful information.