You’ve done the hard work of finding a teacher, setting up the first lesson, signing them up for weekly lessons, getting them the books and supplies that they will need for their lessons, and gotten through the excitement that comes along with first few weeks taking music lessons. Eventually though, as with anything in life, shiny things start to look dull. What can you as a parent do to help motivate your student to practice if their interest starts waning?
First off, the most important strategy long term strategy to keep your child motivated to practice is to start off by instilling good practice habits. Part of this is the responsibility of the teacher, to outline their weekly expectations for the student. With some kids, this is easy. If a teacher expects their students to practice a certain number of times throughout the week, and can set up an incentive system to motivate them, getting them to practice regularly will be a breeze. With some kids this might be more challenging, but the secret is to start them off from the get go with solid practice habits. An incentive program can be initiated after the student has been taking lessons for awhile, and it may be just as successful, but it is better to start with some type of motivational approach from the beginning.
Failure to plan, or planning to fail?
Imagine though, if your child’s interest is waning, despite setting up good practice habits from the beginning. What can you do as a parent to motivate him or her to practice? Perhaps there is an activity or hobby that you’re really into, and they see you doing regularly. Are you a runner, or play an instrument yourself? Maybe you’re really into going to spin classes or regularly go to the gym. It doesn’t really matter what the activity is, but you can attempt to parlay your experience with whatever it is you do and explain to them the virtues of making it a daily and regular habit. If they see their mom or dad making it a regular habit to practice yoga, go biking or some type of activity and that they see you reap the rewards from it, only by making it a regular habit, they might be able to see that as well as far as applying the same thing to their practicing.
This method may be a bit on the passive side, but could be very helpful. But if you want to do something more pro-active, there’s nothing better than applying some good ol’fashioned incentives to whatever you might do for your kids to get them to do other things around the house. While I wouldn’t advocate kids equating practicing their instrument to a chore, it is ok to use some type of system to get them over the inevitable hump of boredom with practicing. Occasionally this is just a temporary span of boredom that they will get over, so some incentives can definitely help get them through a tough spot. Some other tactics may involve the teacher needing to incorporate some different activities such as adding composing and songwriting, trying completely different songs that they are not used to or any number of alternate activities to get a student to think differently about music and practicing, even if it’s just temporary. Simply mixing things up can make a huge difference.
Another thing to note; sometimes boredom is actually a sign of frustration that a kid has a tough time expressing. Maybe they are feeling like the lessons are getting challenging or they are finding it more difficult during their practice sessions to get through a difficult section in their piece. If a parent and their teacher can do some investigation into what is really going on, they might find that the student is not bored and unmotivated, but actually frustrated and needing some more guidance and tools to approach their practice sessions. So seeing a student become less motivated to practice may be a sign of something else that is affecting them negatively and just doing a little investigation can help them get through the tough time which will most likely be temporary.