“I don’t like the piano,” my son says to me as we sit around the kitchen table.
“Why not?” I ask, ladling hot soup into bowls.
“I don’t know,” he says, looking down at his hands. “I just don’t.”
I sit down at my place. No one says anything. The soup is too hot to eat so we swirl our spoons around our bowls in a contemplative sort of way and think about the problem of piano lessons.
It’s unusual for Jonathan to be negative about anything. He’s the most agreeable, enthusiastic child I’ve ever met. He loves everything.
Just not piano.
“Your cousins play the piano,” I offer, thinking perhaps he’s gotten it into his head that piano playing is for girls. “Even Alex.” Alex walks on water. It’s underhanded of me to use him as an example in this situation, but I’m desperate. “They’re quite good.”
“I know,” he sulks. I’m pretty sure I can see tears in the corners of his eyes.
“It’s fun, Jonathan!” Faith adds. She has been dying to start lessons again since we moved, and now that I’ve found a teacher for her, she has been practicing her scales day and night just so she’s ready for her first lesson.
But Jonathan has never taken lessons. He’s never so much as laid a finger on our keyboard, and yet he’s decided he hates it.
I do not know what to do. When my husband comes home, I accost him with the question. We wrestle with the pros and cons because there are no easy answers. Every child is so different, and each set of circumstances brings new points to consider.
In what situations do you make your child do something he does not want to do?
I know my son will benefit from musical training. I’m fairly confident he will love it once he starts. I think about where his talents and his disposition and I am certain he’ll be quite good at the piano, although I don’t expect the child to become some sort of maestro. One year of lessons is all I want from him at this point. Just one year.
But my goodness, the very suggestion is causing trauma in the boy’s life. I see the tears in his eyes when we talk about it and they cut my heart. Am I doing the right thing? Am I loving my son by stretching him beyond his comfort zone and introducing him to a skill he’ll have for the rest of his life, or am I causing him to despair? Am I bending him in a direction he is not naturally inclined to go for his own good, or mine?
I second-guess my decision until my husband takes me by the shoulders and says simply, “Make him do it. It’ll be good for him.”
I think about that long into the night, after my husband has fallen asleep and the red numbers on the alarm clock tick through the midnight minutes. “It will be good for him…” If only my brown-eyed boy would see it that way.
The next morning, I search for the piano teacher’s phone number while the kids chatter over breakfast. I do not like making phone calls. If the entire world could be operated by e-mail, I’d be a happy girl. I can talk in front of a thousand people, but put me on the phone and I’m a mess.
That’s when it occurs to me: we all have to do things we do not want to do. A hundred times a day, in big and small ways, I have to discipline myself to do the things that would not be my first choice if left to my own devices. The world does not operate around my desires.
Neither should a childhood.
My son, who loves everything and everybody, rarely has an opportunity to learn how to handle a difficult or challenging situation, one that he would not choose on his own. He always gets to do exactly what he wants, and he always wants to do exactly what he is asked.
He might not understand it now, but challenge is a gift for him.
In this unwanted circumstance, he gets to learn how to try with integrity, how to control his attitude despite the situation, and how to look for the good when all he sees are reasons to complain.
It’s not about piano.
It’s about life.
I am reminded that I am not raising children. I am raising adults. I want to raise adults who understand that often in life, they will be required to give their best to something they do not love. They are slaves, not masters, and most days are filled with the stuff of servitude: cleaning bathrooms, making lunches, wiping noses, answering to a boss.
Too often, I parent my children as if they are going to become sovereigns. It’s easy, in this fast-food life, to give them exactly what they want and nothing they don’t.
I do them a disservice when I do not require more of them than what they are inclined to give. Life simply is not like that, and life will not go well for them if I have raised them to believe their needs and wants are all that matters. I will have failed if they grow up believing they are Boss of Everything.
I should be parenting my children to be servants, good and faithful, because that is who they were made to be. As I parent my son through this season of piano lessons, that will be my aim: to teach him to work at it with his whole heart, whether he likes it or not, because he is first and foremost a servant, not a sovereign.
“It will be good for him,” my husband said. As I dial the piano teacher to schedule my son’s first lesson, I am confident he is right.
Thank you for this! I’ve had the same thoughts rolling around in my head for my little girl (who is 2 1/2). I love how to you reached this conclusion and the bigger picture behind it. I don’t want to raise a spoiled child, rather a self-disciplined adult.
It’s difficult to know how to parent sometimes, but I think it helps to think about how we want our children to live as adults. We have been given a huge responsibility!
This Piano teacher says YES YES YES!!!!!
I am sampling part of this post in my weekly newsletter tomorrow that I send out to my students. Thank you for so eloquently stating this! Piano isn’t just about music!
Thank you, Charity!
Disclaimer: I am no expert on parenting, and do not claim to be one. I struggle daily with how to raise my 4 children to be what God wants them to be and to be the father He wants me to be.
I whole-heartedly agree that children must learn to do things they do not want to do, and they certainly need to learn they are not “the boss of everything”. I think that children should be required to do some things they don’t want to do just because it is good for them. I also think children should learn to not quit on something just because it gets difficult (I hope my kids get the good side of my stubbornness), and that most everything in life that is worth doing/having requires work (which we most of the times don’t want to do).
I am a very “musical person” and come from a musically inclined family. I do think music education is important, studies have shown that exposure to a good music education can help with many other skills, and that even just learning to read music can open up a whole world of possibilities. But I will say from personal experience that piano isn’t necessarily the instrument for everyone….
I was required to take piano starting in the second half of Kindergarten. I hated it. I was required to take it all the way through high school and I still hated it. Now, I LOVED my teachers (I had some of the best!) and I tried liking it because of them. I got “good” at it and even worked very hard for competition because I wanted to please my teacher but still I hated playing the piano.
The Lord has gifted me with lots of musical talent (singing, trumpet, trombone, etc), but not when it came to piano. Piano playing never became enjoyable, it never got easier, and as soon as I graduated High school I stopped playing. Less than a year later, while in college, I sat down in one of the little practice rooms in my dorm to play a fairly simple piece and it was like starting over, it is NOT a skill I retained. 13 years of lessons and practice and I had little to no piano skills left within a year of stopping daily practice. I don’t know about you, but I like to have something to show for my years of work (even work I dislike). I haven’t played in over 15 years now despite having one in my living room and I do not miss it at all.
My 3 younger sisters also were required to take piano, just like I did. 2 of them loved it and still play regularly. Now did they always want to practice? No, but that’s a different issue. My 3rd sister is quite a bit more like me and while I think she might enjoy playing occasionally by herself, she has never wanted anyone around when she plays so I really don’t know.
Did any of us hate learning music? No, in fact we all loved music (and still do). Was it the hard work involved that was an issue? No. We had required practice and lessons for voice and other instruments and I never hated those. But not every instrument suites every musician…
I share all of that to make a few quick points.
One: I think we should be careful to not just require our kids to learn something just because we wish we had that skill. If you want to learn piano, you take the lessons and practice, don’t force your dream on your kids. (this goes for lots of things not just piano… )
Two: Yes, I think we should require our kids to try things outside of their comfort zones. Expose them to as many different avenues of learning and skills as you can! But after they’ve given something a good try, if it doesn’t fit them and they still hate it – move on! Have them try a different instrument! Maybe the guitar or saxaphone or violin or piccolo or trombone is what they are better suited for!
One thing I can say for sure is that the older I get the more I wished I had had even more practical skills training in my youth when I had time to learn… would sure be nice to have had some carpentry/shop skills that I could fall back on, or other skills I could actually use in my life instead of so much academic learning for academic sake…
In the end, just remember that not every child has been gifted to be a musician; the Lord may have given them the talents it takes to be a carpenter or maybe an electrician or writer or scientist or chef or teacher instead. It is our job to teach them how to learn, and not be afraid to try new things, and do it wholeheartedly (with their might); so that they can become who/what the Lord wants them to be and how to seek the Lord’s guidance in their lives.
Wow, this was much longer than intended. Please forgive my verboseness…
I love hearing your perspective–no apology necessary! I think you add many good points to the discussion that I did not have in my post, and because each and every child and each and every circumstance is so different, I appreciate your insight as it will help others who are struggling with this area.
I agree that we shouldn’t make our children do things just because we wished WE had that opportunity ourselves. I took two years of piano myself and never regretted quitting! It wasn’t for me. My husband also took lessons because his parents made him, and he too quit with no regrets. So, I honestly will not mind if Jonathan decides that piano is not for him. He really wants to learn the guitar, and I just acquired a guitar for him. But, I think the piano will help him have a better understanding of how music works, so I would like him to have that first. I homeschool, so he does not have the benefit of a music class to help with some of those things (and I have failed to teach it myself). If he decides that music isn’t for him, I will be happy that at least he understands the language of music enough to be comfortable reading a hymnal. 🙂
Also, I completely agree that practical skills are important. My husband tells my boys over and over how important it is that they let me teach them to sew because he went to college not knowing how to sew on his own buttons! Carpentry–yes! Cooking, shop, basic auto-mechanic skills–all the stuff our grandparents could do but we’ve forgotten–all of that knowledge is lost on my kids’ generation. You are right to remind me how important those things are. Thank you for helping me to keep it in perspective!
And do the piano teacher a favor and have her read this too so she’s on the same page with you! 🙂 (Or at least tell her 😉 )
I have to say, at the beginning I sympathized with Jonathan. “Maybe another instrument would be a better fit,” I thought. But by the end, I totally agree with you. Especially since he’s rarely in this situation of having to do something he’s not excited about. All the best to both of you, and I hope he learns to love it! Thank you for writing. 🙂
You are right–I made sure to talk to the piano teacher ahead of time and he has been a great resource. Neither one of us wants him to have to teach a difficult student, but thankfully, I trust Jonathan not to be a difficult student (even if he secretly wishes he didn’t have to take piano lessons). So far, so good!
Interesting take.
Please don’t take my comment as a criticism. It’s just another opinion.
Love hearing other opinions, Rita! Thank you for your perspective. If Jonathan was a little less HAPPY all the time, I think he would suffer more. He’s just too cheerful for his own good. 🙂
Won’t school, for example, be a trial that must be endured? Do we need to add things to children’s list of things they don’t want to do? There’s cleaning up after yourself, brushing your teeth, eating what you’re not fond of, eating more than you want, being good while visiting people you don’t want to visit, not whining for things you’re not going to get at the store… Oh my! And that’s just what’s off the top of my head. I think adults see their children’s lives much differently than the children themselves.
Yes, there are things I offered my children, things I would have killed to be able to do when I was young (or at least, looking back, that’s what I think) that they decided was not for them. I didn’t force them eventhough I disagreed. It didn’t turn them into selfish, self-centred adults. They struggle with life, persevere, succeed sometimes and fail other times, but they pick themselves up, pay their dues, march bravely on. They all finished school. They all promptly left home after that schooling, despite being welcome to stay. They had the confidence and strength that they needed to embark and explore.
Absolutely! I’ve pushed my six children to do many, many hard things that they believed they were incapable of. I don’t regret even one of those hard things, and I really don’t think the kids (eventually!) do, either. In fact, I think I could have pushed (lovingly) a bit more, in some cases, not given in to the whines and the pleas, when my ears got tired. Hang in there, young mamas!
That is so true! We are raising adults not children. I think if we only give or allow our kids what they want anyway we are not teaching them to trust those in authority(aka parents right now) and to lean on Jesus when something is difficult or not as easy as other things.
I love your writing. Truth with love…that is how I would describe it.
One year may not be enough. I’ve been told (by a teacher of piano teachers) that it takes the average person three years of piano lessons to reach the level of competence to be able to really enjoy playing the piano.
It’s true, one year may not be enough but all I really want is for him to have a basic understanding of music before he chases after an instrument like the guitar or the drums (so not going to buy that boy a drum set). But, he’s had two lessons and he’s already starting to admit he likes it! Woot!
Yes Kristie, I wish I had continued to insist that Jeff take lessons. So does he. I’m excited for Jonathan! : )
Yes, yes, YES! This was awesome!