Setting the Pace

One of the more difficult aspects of supporting your child in their musical journey is knowing how quickly or slowly they should be progressing. There are three people involved in setting the pace for learning: the teacher, the parent and, most important of all, the child. A few posts ago I wrote at length about setting up good habits and developing your child's motivation to play. One thing that has a significant influence on those habits and levels of motivation is your child's perception of what he or she is learning and how quickly.

Nothing will put a child off better than feeling as though they aren't making any progress, that no goals have been achieved. We all need rewards for our efforts, and a sense of achievement is one of the best rewards of all. However, feeling under pressure to progress faster than is comfortable can have a negative effect too. Putting undue pressure on your child may well make them feel that they have no control over their learning, that they're learning only to please others and not themselves, and also that, no matter how hard they try, it is never good enough because someone is always expecting them to do more.

Some of you may be thinking that it's good parenting to have high expectations of your children. After all, children will live up to those expectations, won't they? Also, what's wrong with doing something in order to make a parent or teacher happy? I agree that high expectations can lead a child to perform better and try harder because children are so easily influenced by what others think of them. Tell your child that they're no good and they won't try to be good any more - what's the point of trying to persuade someone who's made their mind up about you? Believe in them and they'll think it's worth believing in themselves.

The point where it's so easy to cross the line, though, is when you give your child the impression that they're learning to play the piano for you and not themselves. As I've said before, the best motivation is that that comes from within. How many of us didn't object to learning at school, only to learning what someone else told us to learn? How much natural curiosity and enthusiasm is destroyed by heavily controlled school curricula? (But that's another story!)

If, as a parent, you express impatience or frustration with your child's progress, as well as associating negative emotions with their learning, they will also feel that they're learning to please you and that you're difficult to please. What a dampener on motivation that must be! Similarly, if you push your child on faster than they naturally progress they'll not only fail to consolidate their new skills, they'll also experience feelings of confusion and ineptitude rather than mastery.

Of course, it can be difficult when your child is in a situation where they see other children who are apparently ahead of them, and let's be honest that as parents it's also a source of comfort and pride to us to know that our child is at least keeping pace with their peers. But the thing to bear in mind is that, as long as your child is practising regularly, they are improving their skills and they're adding more hours to the theoretical 10,000 hours required for mastery of a subject.

We once went through a difficult phase with my son's learning when a child who was a year younger than him suddenly had a period of accelerated learning and caught up to his own stage of progress. He found this very upsetting and it was so detrimental to his feelings about learning to play the piano that I seriously considered giving up. Luckily I turned to his teacher and the most effective piece of advice she gave was to ignore my son when he talked about his feelings of inadequacy compared to this other child. I did so, and when he insisted on an answer I just said that it didn't matter. This attitude turned the tide for us and I realised that by being sympathetic to his upset over this I had been unwittingly feeding into his perception that there was something be upset about.

Teachers can be as guilty as parents for destroying a child's motivation by implying that they aren't progressing quickly enough. I would say that if you have a teacher that doesn't praise your child for their effort alone as well as whatever other small achievements they make, then find another teacher. I am not saying that it's impossible to produce excellence through making a child miserable, but it isn't necessary either. The love of any subject is at least equally as good at producing the effort required to excell, and I think it goes without saying that it's by far the preferable route with no risk of burnout or collapse.

In short, the person who is best at setting the pace for their learning is your child. Of course there will be times when they plateau, and at that point it's important to keep the motivation going by setting simpler goals for them to achieve. There will also be times when they apparently rush through a stage and I think at these times it's best to let them go with it. You can always go back and polish pieces that weren't thoroughly learned. Allow them the pleasure of indulging their enthusiasm.

Playing the piano is a skill that's developed over years, and as long as they're practising playing well, the speed with which they learn the songs in their coursebook isn't important. There is so much more to praise and celebrate than the learning of a new song. Focus your praise on working hard and playing beautifully and allow your child to learn at their own pace.