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.