Learning music is often described as a relationship between a student and a teacher, but for young musicians there is usually a third person who plays an important role: the parent. Parents purchase instruments and books, provide transportation to lessons, pay tuition, and make countless other practical contributions that allow music education to happen. Their influence, however, can extend far beyond logistics.
A parent can help establish practice habits, expose a child to new music, encourage them through periods of frustration, and provide opportunities to experience music outside the lesson room. At the same time, too much involvement can prevent a student from developing the independence that becoming a musician ultimately requires.
The ideal role of a parent, therefore, is not static. As a student develops, the parent's role should develop with them. What begins as active participation should gradually become support and encouragement, with the eventual goal of allowing the student to take ownership of their own musical education.
Establishing the Practice Routine
One of the most valuable things parents can do for a beginning student is help establish a regular practice routine.
Young children generally do not have the organizational skills or self-discipline to independently manage everything they are expected to do. Schoolwork, chores, recreation, family activities, and music all compete for their attention. Telling a young beginner that they should practice and then leaving the decision entirely to them may not be realistic.
Parents can help by making practice a normal part of the household routine. It might happen after school, before dinner, after homework, or at another reasonably consistent time. The specific time matters less than establishing the expectation that practice is simply something we do regularly.
The amount of practice required will vary considerably depending on the student's age, goals, experience, and level of study. As discussed in Practice Takes Practice, useful general guidelines are:
10–15 minutesYoung beginners establishing their first practice habits
20–30 minutesDeveloping students working on technique, repertoire, and assignments
45–60 minutesSerious intermediate and advanced students
Two hours or moreHighly advanced, collegiate, and professional-level goals
These should not be treated as rigid requirements for every student. Fifteen focused minutes can accomplish considerably more than an unfocused hour. The larger objective is to establish consistency and teach students how to use their practice time effectively.
Yes, Sometimes Parents Need to Make Their Child Practice
There is a romantic idea that a child who truly loves music will always want to practice. That is not how motivation works.
Adults do not wake up every morning equally enthusiastic about exercising, working, cleaning the house, or fulfilling every other responsibility in their lives. Children are no different.
A student saying, “I don't want to practice today,” does not necessarily mean they dislike their instrument or should quit lessons. Sometimes they are tired. Sometimes the material is difficult. Sometimes another activity seems more appealing. Sometimes they simply do not feel like practicing.
This is where an established routine becomes valuable. Motivation can begin an activity, but habits sustain it when motivation temporarily disappears.
There will consequently be times when a parent needs to require practice. That is not inherently harmful. There is an important difference, however, between requiring that practice happen and attempting to control every moment of the practice session.
A parent can establish that twenty minutes of practice needs to happen before another activity without standing over the student correcting every note.
Practice Is Not a Performance
Parents naturally enjoy hearing their children play well, and praise can be an important source of encouragement. However, it is important to recognize that effective practice often does not sound particularly good.
Practice is where mistakes are supposed to happen.
A student may play the same two measures ten times. They may slow a passage down until it barely resembles the piece. They may miss the same note repeatedly while trying to understand why it keeps happening. They may isolate a rhythm, experiment with fingerings, or temporarily make something sound worse while changing an established habit.
If everything coming from the practice room sounds polished, the student may simply be playing material they can already perform rather than working on what they cannot yet do.
Parents can help by praising effort, persistence, consistency, and improvement, rather than reserving encouragement exclusively for successful performances. Recognizing that a difficult passage sounds better than it did yesterday can be more meaningful than simply saying, “That sounded great.”
This also means allowing students to make mistakes without immediately intervening.
Learning to Struggle
One of the most important abilities a musician develops is the capacity to encounter a problem and work through it.
A wrong note needs to be identified. A difficult rhythm needs to be understood. A technical problem may require experimentation. Sometimes the solution does not appear immediately.
For very young beginners, parents may need to provide substantial assistance. As students mature, however, they need opportunities to struggle.
This can be uncomfortable for a parent who knows how to solve the problem. But immediately providing the answer can deprive the student of an opportunity to develop their own problem-solving skills.
Musical independence requires learning to ask: What is wrong? Why isn't this working? What can I try differently?
Making mistakes is not evidence that music education is failing. Learning how to recognize and correct those mistakes is part of music education itself.
Let Children Develop Their Own Musical Interests
Parents inevitably bring their own musical tastes into the home. A parent may love classical music, jazz, country, rock, metal, musical theater, or the music they grew up listening to.
Sharing that music with children can be wonderful. Expecting children to develop exactly the same tastes is something different.
Students are generally more motivated when they have some ownership over the music they play. A child who becomes fascinated with film music, video-game soundtracks, jazz, pop, metal, anime music, or any other style has discovered a source of musical curiosity. That interest can become a pathway into technique, theory, ear training, composition, improvisation, and countless other areas of musicianship.
There is no reason that a parent's favorite music must become the child's favorite music.
Rather than narrowly controlling what students hear, parents can provide broad, age-appropriate access to music. Modern students have access to an extraordinary amount of recorded music. Used appropriately, that access gives them an opportunity previous generations could scarcely have imagined: the ability to explore enormous portions of the world's musical traditions from home.
The more music students encounter, the more opportunities they have to discover what genuinely interests them.
Take Students to Hear Live Music
Recorded music cannot completely replace the experience of hearing musicians perform in the same room.
Parents can foster musical curiosity by taking students to live performances whenever practical. These experiences do not need to involve expensive tickets to major professional organizations.
A local high-school band or orchestra concert can be valuable. So can a community ensemble, college recital, musical, jazz performance, church concert, festival, or professional orchestra.
Live performances allow young musicians to see what musical participation can eventually become. A beginning saxophonist can watch an advanced saxophonist perform. A young pianist can see how another pianist interacts with an ensemble. A student who has only experienced an orchestra through recordings can feel what that orchestra actually sounds like in a concert hall.
Musical education does not occur exclusively during a weekly lesson. Listening is part of learning music.
Parents Can Learn Alongside Young Students
Parents do not need to be musicians themselves to participate in a young child's musical education.
For younger beginners, sitting in on lessons can be extremely useful. A parent can hear the teacher's instructions, learn what the student is expected to practice, understand terminology being introduced, and observe how the teacher approaches a particular problem.
In some cases, the parent may effectively learn alongside the child.
This can make practice at home considerably easier. Instead of a young student trying to remember everything that happened during the lesson, the parent has enough information to help reinforce the teacher's instructions.
The important distinction is that this arrangement should not necessarily continue forever.
Communication Should Gradually Shift to the Student
With young children, most communication naturally occurs between the parent and teacher. Parents handle scheduling, discuss concerns, ask questions, and help make educational decisions.
As students mature, they should increasingly participate in that communication themselves.
An older student who is struggling with an assignment should learn to tell the teacher what they are having difficulty with. They should learn to ask questions when they do not understand something. Eventually, they should be capable of discussing their goals, repertoire, practice challenges, and musical interests directly with their instructor.
These are small acts of independence, but they are important ones.
A parent can remain involved and available without speaking on behalf of a student who has become capable of speaking for themselves.
Knowing When to Back Off
Different students require dramatically different levels of parental involvement.
One child may require reminders every day. Another may become fascinated with music and begin practicing without being asked. Neither situation is particularly unusual.
When a student begins demonstrating responsibility, parental involvement should change accordingly.
If a teenager is independently practicing for an hour, keeping track of assignments, preparing for lessons, asking their teacher questions, and actively seeking out new music, there is little reason for a parent to continue managing their practice as though they were a seven-year-old beginner.
Independence should be rewarded with independence.
Parents can still provide transportation, instruments, lessons, concert opportunities, encouragement, and other resources. They simply transition from managing the student's musical activity to supporting it.
The Parent's Role Should Evolve
Perhaps the most important principle is that there is no single correct level of parental involvement throughout a student's musical education.
A young beginner may need a parent to purchase materials, attend lessons, establish a practice schedule, remind them what to work on, and help them understand their assignments.
As the student develops, the parent becomes more of a support system—providing resources and transportation, encouraging consistency, exposing the student to different kinds of music, attending performances, communicating with the teacher when necessary, and occasionally enforcing expectations.
Eventually, the parent's role may become primarily that of a facilitator and supporter.
That final stage is not a sign that the parent is no longer contributing. In many ways, it represents the success of everything that came before it.
The goal of parental involvement in music education should not be to produce a child who practices only when reminded, performs only to please adults, or depends upon someone else to solve every musical problem. The goal is to help create the conditions in which a young person can gradually discover music, develop discipline and curiosity, learn from mistakes, and eventually assume responsibility for their own growth.
Parents do not need to be professional musicians to make an enormous contribution to that process. They need to provide opportunity, reasonable structure, encouragement, exposure, and—when the time comes—the freedom for their child to take ownership of music for themselves.
PAC Music Academy’s private music lessons are designed to help students build musical skills and increasing independence at every stage of learning.