PPP200: Ten Common Reasons Students Quit Piano Lessons

06Jul 2020 by Shelly Davis

I can’t tell you how many times adults learn that I teach piano and tell me their sad story of their own lessons as a child. Without fail, they tell me they wish they hadn’t quit.

This is our opportunity to help our own children reach a different conclusion with their piano studies. Let’s talk about why children often quit piano and how we can help them persevere.

Listen to the full episode here

10. Middle School

When students grow up and gain a little more independence and get involved in extra-curricular activities, piano often gets pushed to the wayside. 
 
Adding band or sports in middle school doesn’t have to mean the end of piano lessons. In fact, all the training your piano kid has had in piano will help them a great deal in their beginning band or choir class. The two activities can compliment each other.

9. Distraction or being overscheduled

If you have them involved in a different activity every day of the week, when are they going to be able to spend time learning how to do any of those activities better and with more confidence?

Learn more about avoiding too many activities in PPP102.

8. Piano is not cool

Yeah, tell that to Clint Eastwood or Harry Connick, Jr. or Freddie Mercury or John Legend.

7. Lose Interest

You might think new music would be the solution to this problem, and it can help as a means to engage the student. Ultimately, this is an attitude shortcoming and a schedule issue.

There are plenty of things adults have to do, whether they are interested or not. Children need to be taught to endure. They need to learn how to face things they might not choose to deal with. Schoolwork has to be done, whether they are interested in the subject matter or not. Household chores and responsibilities must be done, even if there is something else they’d rather be doing.

Very often, schoolwork and household chores must be done at a certain time if they will get done at all.

My laundry day is Friday. It is part of my routine and it gets done every Friday. The beauty of this is that I don’t fret or worry about doing laundry the rest of the week because I have a plan for getting it done. This makes me feel successful about laundry.
 
Vacuuming, on the other hand, is not part of my routine, I only do it when the carpets get really bad (or when company is coming). As a consequence, it seems like I’m always thinking about vacuuming….I’m not DOING it, just thinking about it. If I would make it part of my routine, it would get done more frequently, I wouldn’t have that chore looming my imaginary to-do list, and I would feel more successful at keeping my carpet clean.
 
Yes, give your child interesting music to play but if their mindset is not right, no amount of music will help. If you leave practice as an option when there is time to do it, there will never be time to do it.

6. Don't feel successful

If I don’t think I’m good at something, at least good enough to enjoy it, I don’t want to do it.

Walking, I’m good at. Loosing weight, not so much. I view walking as a tool for loosing weight so I don’t want to do it. If I see walking as an opportunity to get some Vitamin D and enjoy nature and spend time with a family member, that’s a success.

Even with preparing this 200th episode, I wanted it to be so special that I couldn’t really get started. Until I just decided it needed to be done, special or not, it stayed on my to-do list.

Parents must set up a system for regular practice. The only way to become good at a thing is to do the thing often. I wonder if our kids get so good at making excuses for not practicing because they “practice” making excuses more than they practice playing the piano.

6. Students don't see progress

Making music is an intangible concept. It’s hard to gauge if you’re getting better at reading music when every piece of music is a little harder than the one you just learned. 
 
A lot of teachers don’t use method books, or they choose to get out of them as quickly as possible and into “real” music. Maybe it’s a weakness of mine, but I enjoy taking students through method books.
 
They feel successful when they complete a book. As we move through the book, they select favorite pieces they’ve learned which serve as review pieces I often remind them how they thought the piece was too difficult when they were first trying to learn it and now it seems easier to play.
 
The piece didn’t change; their skill level did.

4. No end in sight

Set targets, short term and long term. (Navy Seal, Chadd Wright shares his story on the Jon Gordon Positive University podcast – the one mile repeat on the beach is when most recruits quit.)

3. Parent-child conflict

If you and your piano kid are constantly at odds about practicing at home, you may decide the easier option is simply to quit.
 
Without some of the suggestions I mentioned earlier, setting up systems for practice and working through music and aiming for short-term goals, the burden of getting your child to the piano to practice and keeping them in piano lessons will be all yours. All the things we ever talk about trying to motivate your piano kid to practice, relate to your own motivation to convince them to practice.
 
If you set things up as you versus your child, they are going to resist and you will have conflict. If you set up systems and a routine or framework, you can both enjoy success without so much conflict.
 
There are plenty of things to butt heads with your piano kid about, piano doesn’t need to be one of them.

Teacher - student mismatch

Sometimes it’s not piano in general that your piano kid isn’t connecting with. Sometimes you just need to find a different teacher.
 
There are lot’s of reasons to move to a different teacher and they’re not necessarily bad. If a teacher’s expertise is in jazz music and improvisation and your piano kid wants to learn to read music and study classical repertoire, that will not be a good fit. If a teacher works with teens and adults, you can’t assume they will be a good fit for your preschooler. Conversely, if you begin lessons for your preschooler with a wonderful teacher, at some point they could grow beyond the ability of the teacher to keep them moving forward.
 
If a student comes to me wanting to work on advanced literature, I am going to have to give them a list of references because I won’t be able to serve them well.

1. Parents let them

Take quitting off the table.
 
Make adjustments. Have open conversations. But don’t let quitting be the easy out.
 
Sometimes, piano kids internalize quitting by thinking they weren’t good enough. We don’t want that for our piano kids.
 
Next week, we will hear from Dorothy Yan who has lot’s of encouragement for parents and students. In her interview, she makes a wonderful distinction between quitting because you think something is too hard and stopping because you choose to. 
 
If you choose to stop piano lessons, make sure it is a conscious decision that you and your piano kid are making. Even with obstacles that can get in the way, quitting piano lessons doesn’t have to be your only option.

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