There are two possible outcomes, positive and negative. I’ve seen kids go either way, teeter on the brink and come back.
But children’s experiences at the piano all follow a pattern that, with time, you will see. You can alter the path of a child’s experience, but first you’ll have to accept what their current course or reaction is, even if it is unpleasant news.
POSITIVE OUTCOME
The best you can hope for is that child and teacher are a good match, and the child slowly progresses without losing enthusiasm. The danger is always that the child runs out of steam as the “hills” get steeper and difficult to climb, even with persistence.
I’ve helped countless kids go from six years old to twelve years old at the piano, and emerge still interested in further effort. Being interested in further effort is perhaps all that one can hope for in an art that is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration.
It takes a tremendous amount of work to get good at playing the piano, and I’ve noticed that the children who do the best are those who have reasonable expectations for themselves (in general), and whose parents have equally relaxed expectations.
Strangely enough, it is the parents who insist on practice, keeping track and nagging, who have kids who don’t want to play. Another destructive scenario that parents engage in is to compare their child to another child. “Why can’t you play Bach like Johnny Perkins? He practices an hour a day!” says Mom. That is a sure way to make your child hate both Johnny Perkins and the piano.
You have to witness a child who, against all the odds and teacher’s opinions, is allowed the room to play piano in their own way. In a supportive environment, where there is no open competition with other students or curriculum, children’s natural abilities can be used, and any child can use their own common sense to come up with a performance of a song that makes them feel good, the way music is supposed to.
That vision of your child playing the piano, under their own steam, enjoying what they are playing, is the positive outcome. It doesn’t get better than that.
Forget Carnegie Hall and any other foolish benchmark. If you are concentrating on enabling your child to to enjoy music making at the piano under any terms, you are going in the right direction.
If you push your child to compete and accomplish at a rate they find unnatural, you are in for a rude surprise when they are finally able to tell you the truth: they don’t like to play. Competition and forced accomplishment at the piano produces resentment, period.
NEGATIVE OUTCOME
We’ve all heard the horror stories. Here’s a list of the major trends:
- I hated my lessons so much I never play.
- I never really learned anything. I can’t remember anything.
- I hated practicing and my teacher got mad. We never played music, just boring exercises.
- I wanted to start again as an adult but I remembered all that drudgery and the teacher this time was the same as when I was a child, so dull.
If you look carefully at these rather generalized statements, the root cause of the failure is clearly the piano teacher’s method. No one ever says, “I hate hearing the piano played well.” People are inherently drawn to the piano, and, indeed, as a former film composer, I would point out that the piano is used cinematically and audio-wise to project the idea of “home.” That is, you hear a piano and you think of home. It’s psycho-acoustics, in a way. The sound of a piano makes people feel good.
But the piano teachers are trained unwittingly to turn out failures. Why? Since the method is so hard for the average person, it is fairly certain they will fail. Since no accomodation is ever made for the individual, failure is almost certain for the average person and certainly the average child.
This explains the 90% failure rate that conventional piano lessons deliver. The piano is too personal and difficult for a “one size fits all” mentality, yet that is the first mistake most piano teachers make, and they make it for a long time.
Few piano teachers ever reverse the trend of 90% failure.
So those are your choices: your child enjoys playing as well as they can, or they are forced to please a teacher and parent, and truly hate the experience.
Your choice of the child's first teacher is really the deciding factor.
By John Aschenbrenner Copyright 2008 Walden Pond Press All Rights Reserved
See also WHAT IS A GOOD AGE TO START PIANO LESSONS
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