"Go do your piano practice!"

 I want to share something from one of my earliest Piano Parent Helps posts.

I'll never forget it. I was standing by the church door with our handbell director and several fellow handbell ringers, thanking people for coming to our concert as they left the building. One of them stopped to express appreciation over the piano solo I'd opened the concert with. I told her, as I try to, that I had a great mom who had really helped me out the first few years of piano.

   After the lady left, the ringer standing with me -- a gifted pianist himself -- smiled and said to me, "Yeah, now I'm so glad for all those years my mom made me practice."

   I chuckled. Clearly our 'recipes for success' had the same ingredient . . . the 'tough' moms who simply wouldn't let us quit.

   I think my opinion is pretty obvious: I'm a piano teacher today (and I love it, and hope you all know that!) because Mom didn't let me quit piano in my second, third, or ninth year.

   I know you all enrolled your kids in piano lessons because you want them to love music. And, though I've never been a parent, I'm sure it's difficult to imagine that you can make your children love music by forcing them to practice. 

   But, the fact is, you might have the most gifted child in the county, and there will be many days when playing with their friends, building Legos, or reading a book will be way more interesting than practicing piano. Especially if they're struggling with a piece that's challenging them. 

   That's where you need to step in. 

   What that looks like will probably be different from one family to another, maybe even from one child to the next. There were many days when my mom did say, flat-out, no beating around the bush, "You need to go do your piano practice right now!" There were also days when she used her own artistic nature and vivid imagination to spark mine. Like when I was learning Brahms's famous lullaby. I've always been a bit of a hard-and-fast player (or at least the hard part), so as you can imagine, I had trouble getting the lullaby to have the soft gentleness needed. So Mom picked up one of my baby dolls, wrapped it up, and sat in the rocker that graced our living room at the time with my baby doll in her arms. Then she made me play the song again. It was mostly effective -- until a perverse streak got a hold of me, and I hit the last chord with all my ten-year-old strength. 😁 Mom responded accordingly by making the doll wail! But the thing is, I remembered the picture, so in the long run, it did help. 

   Dad, not being much on the artistic side, supported me by buying my first piano (he discovered it in the basement of a customer's house he was renovating), driving me to exams and festivals, and faithfully attending all my recitals. Also, when I was convinced I had failed one of my exams in later years, he consoled me by buying me a bunch of peach-coloured roses. 

   What I'm saying to you is, do what it takes. It might mean taking on the tough-mom/tough-dad role. It might mean giving your frustrated child a shoulder to cry on. It might mean finding ways to ignite their imagination, or help them out by reading their notes out loud to them. It will probably, at some point, mean asking them if they are actually practicing their assignments, or just goofing off on the piano. (There's a time and place for that. But they can't just spend their entire practice time improvising instead of working on their songs.) 

   Believe me, it's going to be through the hard work of practice that they will discover the joys of music. And they'll be glad. And so will you.