Has your child been learning to play piano?

My child likes playing piano but hates practicing.

Some tell me that every parent (better would parents, and forget that "every" nonsense) should push their children to continue learning to play but some prefer to leave the child alone if the child only likes to play but doesn't like to practice songs.



I think your English needs improvement.

Thanks.
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Please do feel free to correct the English any time.
Later

I was going to say he was just being mean, since grammar is not what you asked about.

Personally, I wouldn't push the kid to practice. If you are paying for lessons, well, no practice means no more lessons.

I am in between pushing my kid and at the same time trying the balance this issue the best I can. She will not give us the lesson yet hates the down side of it.

A friend told me that he is grateful for his mum's effort to push him complete his piano lessons. As a result, he plays piano now when he is in a good or bad mood. He thinks it is one of the great gifts that his mother has ever given to him.

Off cause this make it easier for me to rationalized the action of push my child to continue the study. If I let her give up now, she might miss a great opportunity to have such a wonderful skill for life. I wonder am I doing the right thing and I am concern that I might to be too pushy.

How old is this child?

10 years old

That's hard.

How does she feel afterwards?

That's something I've used as a metric with my kid (almost 10). She's taking ballet, a really rigorous, disciplined type of ballet, and it's a serious challenge for her. I think challenges are good for her though. When she started this year it was frequently really tough to get her to go to class, but then afterwards she'd rave about how awesome it was. She had a sense of accomplishment once she got through it, but beforehand she wasn't looking forward to the effort.

Because she's so positive about it afterwards I went ahead and pushed her beforehand.

That did ease up though as the year went on, now she actually looks forward to it. I could have easily given up on pushing her when she was complaining so much in the first couple of months.

Which is not to say that pushing is always a good idea, though, at all.

One other thing that helped was just making sure she knew exactly what to expect, schedule-wise. I think part of the difficulty was that I'd remind her an hour before she had to be in class, when she already had other plans (if only to lay around reading a book). Once she locked in that at a certain time on a certain day she was going to ballet, there was less resistance.

My mom did this too and I am grateful (although I wasn't so thrilled when I was a teenager). Perhaps you could negotiate with your daughter for a minimum amount of practice time for lesson preparation. Any other playing could be for her enjoyment. If she does well in her lessons, you could buy her sheet music of her choice as an incentive. Although I always spent more time playing music I liked rather than assigned pieces, any practice helped improve my playing. I would be more concerned if she didn't want to play for her own enjoyment and you still forced her to take piano lessons -- that could lead to her hating the instrument.

Thanks. I am grateful.