Wednesday, January 3, 2018

If you feel the urge to criticize your kids, just shut up

Our niece posted a video of her son's first piano recital, and it reminded me of another boy's piano-playing experience.
This other boy was a little older than our great-nephew. He might have been in junior high school, I think. He had started taking piano lessons the summer between second and third grades, but when the family moved, they didn't have room for the piano for a couple of years or so. I think he started taking lessons again in sixth grade. Heck, he may have been a freshman in high school by the time this incident occurred.
It was in the evening, and he was practicing. He was working on a new piece of music in his lesson book, and it was a little difficult. He was not a natural musician; he had to work hard to make any advances in technique. He played the same half dozen or so measures and then hit a clinker. The same clinker, time after time. There was something about the finger movement required that he didn't get. Perhaps his short stubby fingers didn't reach. Whatever it was, it was going to take some practice to get over that hurdle, to memorize the movement needed at that point in the musical phrase to get to the right note.
But heck, that's what practicing is, isn't it? Making mistakes, learning from them and learning to avoid them in the future.
But after he'd made that same mistake several times, his dad said, irritably, "You must really like that wrong note. You keep hitting it every time."
The young man, already frustrated at himself for failing to catch on to the technique quickly, said, "Oh, shut up."
And the dad walloped him up the side of the head a couple of times.
The boy got up and quit practicing that night. He didn't much care about practicing any more after that.
Eventually, his music teacher told him that he might as well quit wasting his parents' money.
So he quit piano lessons.
He would sit down and play every now and again after that, tunes that he could already play. If he tried a new, harder tune on his own, he only did it when his dad wasn't around, and if he didn't get through it quickly, he moved on to something else.
So, if you have a child who is learning a new skill and is working hard at it, don't knock him if he makes some mistakes. If you are the type of parent who needs to criticize your child, then knock him for not practicing, not making mistakes, not learning something new. Don't knock him for making mistakes because he is trying and failing. Let him keep trying until he gets it.
I think in these instances, it is better to encourage or just shut up.
I am going to give that advice to my niece, now that I have seen her little boy at the piano keyboard. He is young, eager, interested in music and has some talent. He can learn to be an excellent pianist if he gets some encouragement to keep pushing, practice, make mistakes, learn from them.
Perhaps most of us can learn to do lots of stuff if there isn't someone around to discourage us.
Thank God, our niece is an encourager, so I believe the sky is the limit for her piano-playing son.

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