Starting Kids Piano Is Easy, Continuing Is Hard

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Anyone can start to learn the piano.

The real question is, who will survive lessons long enough to actually learn how to play with satisfaction?

The point is, you need to imagine the future of your piano playing before you take any steps.

Two factors will affect how long you will take piano lessons.

The first factor is the teacher and method. The second factor is the student’s emotional memory of  childhood piano lessons.

No child will stay with piano for very long if they feel guilty and pressured. Some may stay if they are constantly pressured by parents, but in my experience, kids who are forced to play piano end up hating it by a ratio of 10 to 1.

What’s the point of surviving years of expensive piano lessons if you are taught, in the end, to hate the piano?

A far better scenario is to engage in piano lessons that proceed at a comfortable pace for your individual child. Piano teachers are notorious for one-size-fits-all teaching.

This scenario continues: having found a teacher willing to move at your child’s pace, the teaching carefully allows the child to enjoy the piano, regardless of how well they are absorbing the teacher’s “method.”

After years of such a gentle approach, you will have a child who simply enjoys the piano, and one day will perhaps take a deeper interest. With a harsher approach, you will have a child whose piano experience ends definitively with their childhood lessons.

As proof of this fact, I offer a recent experience I had with a local family that wanted me to teach their children.

The oldest child had seven years of lessons. Though this child  was not afraid of the piano, they were unable to read any unfamiliar music, which means that they managed the old teacher’s “method” by memorizing. Memorizing is not bad as a skill, but as a means of managing sight reading it is a disaster.

Next, these kids were unable to offer me a single song they could readily play without fumbling through the book, stopping and starting and ultimately crashing to a halt.

Seven years? The least a child who has had seven years of lessons should be able to do is to sight read a simple, unfamiliar piece of music, and then be able to play some piece of music as a piece of music, all the way through without crashing and burning.  It can be Chopsticks, but they have to learn to play the game of music, which means all the way through as best you can and no stopping.

Their last teacher was the local disciplinarian, a man famous for turning out kids who had learned “properly” how to play piano.

Too bad he didn’t turn out kids who could survive his teaching.

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