How Parents Can Support a Child Learning Music

Most of the parents who bring a child for their lesson at CCM have never played an instrument themselves, and many of them worry that this leaves them on the sidelines. The good news is, it doesn’t! The things that make the biggest difference at home are things you can do without reading a note of music.

Here is what they are, and how we know.

What separates the families who thrive

The most useful study on this compared 337 families, all of them learning violin one-to-one. The researcher surveyed the child, the parent and the teacher, then looked at each household as a unit instead of studying the children on their own.

Two of the groups she identified were made up of parents who were equally involved. The same hours, the same effort, near-identical scores on every measure of support the study took. The children in one of those groups were the happiest and most confident in the whole sample. The children in the other were the least.

The difference was not how much. It was how. In the group that struggled, the teacher gave instructions and the parent made sure they were carried out at home, which left the child as the only person in the arrangement without a say. In the group that thrived, all three talked to each other and the child had some say in how practice went.

One more finding is worth knowing before you draw the obvious conclusion. The families where almost nobody talked to anybody, where the parent stayed out of it entirely, did the worst of all. So this is not an argument for stepping back. It is an argument for a different kind of involvement, and every part of it is available to a parent who has never held an instrument.

Ask your child what they want from you

Some children want a parent in the room while they practice. Others find it unbearable. Both are completely normal, the answer changes as they get older, and most parents never think to ask.

It takes one conversation, and it saves a surprising number of arguments.

Keep them in the conversation about practice

Your teacher sets what needs doing and how often. Inside those boundaries, there is usually room for your child to have a say in when and how, and children who get that say tend to push back less.

“When are you going to fit it in today?” gets further than “go and practice now.” It is the same expectation. It just arrives as a question.

Give practice somewhere to happen

A guitar in a case under a bed gets played less than a guitar on a stand in the corner. A keyboard that has to be set up is a keyboard that gets set up less often.

This sounds too small to matter. It is one of the biggest differences between the households we see, and it costs nothing but a decision about where things live.

Protect the relationship with the teacher

A lot of the work is being done by whether your child likes and trusts their teacher. You can help that along simply by taking an interest in it, and by talking to the teacher yourself.

Two minutes at pickup tells you more than any practice chart, and it tells your teacher things about your child that never surface in a lesson. If something is not working, we would always rather hear it early.

Be the audience

This is the one most often skipped, and the one the research keeps pointing at. The phrase in the study is that the parents whose children did best remained “a supremely interested audience.”

It means asking to hear the piece. Sitting down while they play it. Saying what you noticed rather than whether it was good, because “that bit in the middle sounds completely different from last week” proves you were listening in a way that “well done” never will.

You do not need to know whether they played it correctly. You only need to know it is not the same as it was in September, and any parent can hear that.

What fifteen years has shown us

Research describes averages. It cannot tell you what a Tuesday evening looks like in your house. This part is ours.

The families who last are almost never the ones with the strictest practice regime. They are the ones who treat lessons as an ordinary part of the week, the way swimming or soccer is, and who keep turning up when the week has gone badly.

One of our own parents put it better than we would have. Asked what advice she would give someone just starting, Rohan’s mother told us their mantra is simply to keep showing up to class, week after week. Progress in music is not made of perfect weeks. It is made of a long run of ordinary ones.

Try this tonight

Ask your child to play you the piece they are working on. Not the finished one they can already play well. The one still in progress, the one that is a bit of a mess.

Then ask one question about it. Which part is hardest? What are you meant to be fixing? What does your teacher keep saying?

Most children talk for longer than you expect, because it is rare for an adult to ask.

Where this comes from

Claims about research should be checkable, so here is what the above rests on.

Creech, “Learning a musical instrument: the case for parental support,” Music Education Research, 2010. The study of 337 parent-pupil-teacher trios, and the source of the phrase “a supremely interested audience.”

Creech and Hallam, “Learning a musical instrument: the influence of interpersonal interaction on outcomes for school-aged pupils,” Psychology of Music, 2011. The same families, and the paper that sets out the limits: a 42 percent response rate, teachers choosing who received the survey, and no students who had already stopped lessons.

Both studies followed violin students in Britain, and both are surveys taken at a single moment, which means they show what travels together rather than what causes what. Whether the same pattern holds for piano, guitar or voice has not been tested at anything like the same scale. We treat it as a strong hint rather than a proven rule, and it matches what we see.

Book a free trial lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!