3 Absolute ‘Must Know’ Tricks To Have Your Kids Begging For Piano Practice

As a child, one of the things I hated about learning to play the piano was piano practice.

Fast forward a few years and one of the things that really frustrated me about my students was that they didn’t want to practice.

Now, fast forward a few more years and as a piano parent, the thing that had me pulling out my hairs was that my own kids hated practice. 

I know that this is not a phenomena that is just limited to myself, my students and my kids, but something that all piano students, piano teachers and piano parents face day in and day out. 

While I haven’t discovered the silver bullet as yet, I think I have a few suggestions that I think might help you just as much as it helped me. 

So read through them, try each one out a few times, add some of your own ideas and let me know how it goes. 

Stop Practice Sessions Before They Want To

This I found to be very successful with new piano students. 

Wouldn’t it be nice, if we could keep our kids coming back for more?

Well, you know how enthusiastic new piano learners or those learning any instruments for the first time are? They never complain about practice and can’t get enough of it at the start. 

So, in those critical days, I have found that it is often best to only let them practice for a very short time, that is 10 minutes or even less. 

I stop practice very abruptly and very firmly say that it is enough. 

Doing so, leaves them with a sense of hunger for more and that feeling is further expounded when I do it a few days in a row. 

Thus, they don’t have bad feelings about practice, but rather it creates an excitement and anticipation for practice and most importantly an eagerness to learn.

Talk about reverse psychology. 

Even if you don’t try the rest of my suggestions, try this one out and let me know what you think. 

Celebrate The Failures

We often celebrate the victories and leave our children feeling bad about the mistakes.

I found that my daughter in particular hated to practice the piano, because she hated to make mistakes. 

So, I decided to something about it and explained to her that making mistakes was part and parcel of the learning process. 

I even went on to tell her that ‘a person who hadn’t made mistakes, probably hadn’t made anything’. 

I told her the story of Edison and his discovery of the light bulb and it was then that she finally realized, making mistakes was vital for the learning process and that it really helped the learning process. 

Now, I celebrate her mistakes and tell her that the mistakes help her understand what she shouldn’t do, it helps her develop her musical ear and recognize the mistake, and most importantly, it is like a stepping stone on this wonderful musical journey that she is embarking on. 

Reward Your Child

Now, this suggestion that I’m about to make may sound a bit heretical to some homeschool parents and piano parents, but I’m going to say it anyway. 

My son hates piano practice just like my daughter and myself, so in his case I found that leveraging something that he loves doing, in order to make him do, something that he ought to do, really helped. 

He loves to play Minecraft on his iPad and piano practice is something that he knows he has to do for 20 minutes every day. 

So here’s what I did with him, during a very difficult time when he simply hated practice, I would let him play Minecraft on his iPad for 20 minutes directly after he had practiced for a full 20 minutes. 

Now, this only worked because he was not allowed to use the iPad from Sunday to Friday. So getting the opportunity to play Minecraft on week days was a huge reward for him. 

If you are going to implement this strategy, then put some thought into it and also figure out what the duration of the reward should be in relation to the practice time. 

Also ensure that you don’t demand too long of a practice, because the first suggestion still stands and keeping practice sessions short but ensuring consistency (daily practice) is essential. 

I would really love to hear your thoughts on these suggestions before you implement them and let me know how they work out, once you implement them.