Getting Kids To Practice Music

Flutist Barbara Nakazawa, the mother of a From the Top alumnus cellist named
Joshua Nakazawa, suggests an alternative to nagging. She recommends applying
doses of positive peer pressure. "Have your child enroll in a chamber music class,"
she says. "It's true that band and orchestra are fun and social, but with chamber
music, you have to really know your individual part and listen to the other players."

It's important not just to tell your child to practice but also to nurture and monitor
learning and growing. "With chamber music," Nakazawa says, "they will not want
to let the group down — and they will prepare their part. It is most important to let
them find pleasure and magic in music. Chamber music is that magic."

16-year-old From the Top pianist Hilda Huang says that some of the best kind of
familial support isn't necessarily the obvious kind, like helping to finance lessons
and instruments or shuttling kids to rehearsals. "Parents are best as cheerleaders
and, of course, as loving parents," Huang says. "But some support, like the not-so-
obvious things like providing quiet during practice, is always nice and
comforting."However, Hilda offers a note of caution as well. "Often, parents who
are musicians themselves can get too caught up in their child's musical
development," she says. "Living vicariously never did people too much good."

The other side of the coin is when parents don't play an instrument or sing
themselves, but still want to be an active presence. Maybe then it's about sharing
recorded music you love (in any genre), or going to concerts to learn more
together; in the Suzuki model, parents are actually encouraged to learn the
instrument along with the child.

In either case, it's important to focus attention on the kid's experience, and their
perceptions about playing music. "What my children did with their musical talent
and abilities was not about me," stresses Judy Merritt, mother of bassist and From
the Top alum Edward Merritt. "It was about me understanding them, accepting
them and providing support for them and their own musical journeys. No musical
talent is ever wasted — it may just not take the form we want it to take for the
child. And I as a parent had to be okay with that."

So how do you help the child see making music as a great creative outlet rather
than as fuel in an (imaginary) ascent to the top? Judy Merritt has some wisdom
that elevates performance from feats of rote muscle memory to a higher plane.

"My two very different musically gifted children have taught me that if the child
feels the emotional expression, then playing and practicing will be about learning
and perfecting the language of the heart. Playing will have more meaning," Merritt
says. "The best musicians, whether children or adults, are the ones whose heads,
hearts and bodies are all connected in musical expression."

But what do you do when one of your children decides to step back from pursuing
music as intensively as he or she once did? How do you handle the transition
gracefully, particularly if your child's sense of self has largely revolved around
being a musician?
When one of her children decided to scale back from playing so much, Sarah
Odhner (mother of From the Top alum violinist Ben Odhner) figured out a way of
letting things wind down that reduced stress for everyone. "When one of our sons
was 16," she explains, "he gravitated to non-musical activities and really did not to
practice viola. Nagging teens quickly turns toxic, so my husband and I decided to
put him on a six-week plan.

"We outlined a minimal amount of practicing that we expected and told him that we
wouldn't be giving him any reminders to practice. At the end of the six weeks, he
had not fulfilled the minimum requirement, and he dropped the instrument." She
notes that he still loves music, but wound up with a doctorate in chemistry.

Regular practicing is a path towards self-discipline that goes way beyond music —
it's a skill that has hugely positive ramifications for personal fulfillment and lifetime
success. (How "tiger mom" is that?) But the trick is that self-motivated discipline
isn't exactly first nature for most kids, so it's up to families to help create positive,
engaging and fun ways to practice as a path towards self-motivation.

Having a goal for each practice session is essential, whether your child is
practicing for five minutes or a couple of hours each day. From the Top alumna
Ren Martin-Doike, a 20-year-old violist who now studies at the Curtis Institute of
Music in Philadelphia, says that her number one practice technique is to write
down those benchmarks: "Set goals, hold yourself accountable to them and create
a practice log you can be proud of!"

From the Top

"The only way I have found to efficiently work efficiently on large amounts of
different kinds of repertoire — solo, chamber, orchestral — is to have a
premeditated plan," Martin-Doike continues. "For instance, I may decide to devote
my first practice block to warming up, my second block to working on isolating
difficult passages from a concerto, my third to putting fingerings in my orchestra
part, my fourth to studying a new chamber work and spend my last block on
playing through or stitching together the various smaller sections I worked on
earlier in the day. By having a plan, I am able to maximize my time, juggle lots of
different music and prevent aimless practicing or mindless playing through."

Martin-Doike's tip can easily be whittled down for younger and less experienced
players. As a parent leading practice, your aim in a session of five or 10 minutes
might be to help your child really work through just one or two bars of music. That
also makes learning a big hunk of new music less intimidating.

Good practice is intentional practice, adds 16-year-old pianist Hilda Huang, who
appeared on From the Top five years ago: "They say that it takes 10,000 hours of
practice to become a professional," she observes. "But of course that practice
needs to be qualified. Ten thousand hours of intentional, focused and detailed
practice makes someone a better musician, not 10,000 hours of goofing off."

Still, that doesn't mean endless hours of slaving away. "Think of it like athletic
practice," Huang says. "Gymnasts have to perfect four- or five-minute routines, but
they need to spend the training time wisely. Too much tumbling, and their joints
and muscles take on injury and strain. Too little, and they fall off the beam. That's
why every time the gymnast steps on the floor, it's one routine or one set of
hyperfocused, intensive work. And then it's break time."

A couple of From the Top parents have created unique games to encourage their
kids to practice. Charlotte Kufchak, mother of the now 20-year-old violist Rachel
Kufchak, came up a crafty way to beat boredom. "We bought dried beans and
some sparkly paint and had a lot of fun making the beans as colorful and pretty as
possible," Kufchak says. "Then we paid the kids in beans for practicing. It was
great — we never ran out of 'cash.' Each quarter-hour of practicing was worth a
certain number of beans, and each child could save, exchange or spend their
beans as they liked. We had a list of prizes like special treats, Legos, a $5 deposit
in their bank account or a symphony concert. The beauty of it is that it can be
tailored to each child's needs and each family's budget and priorities. And the kids
were willing to practice!"

You can even try game-ifying the actual practicing. Barbara Nakazawa, a Newton,
Mass. flute teacher whose adult son, cellist Joshua Nakazawa, appeared on an
early episode of From the Top, has a handy way of avoiding the dreaded "just
playing it through" syndrome. She calls it "three penny practice."

"You put three pennies on the left side of your music stand," Nakazawa explains.
"On a troublesome measure, you play it once, and if you get it right, you move the
penny to the right side of the stand. If you play it again and get it right, you put the
next penny on the right side of the stand. If you play it again and miss a note or
rhythm, then all three pennies get put to the left. You must play the measure
correctly three times in a row in order to keep the pennies. The next step is to
connect the troublesome measure to the measure before it and continue playing."

I play the penny game with my own daughter, and she absolutely loves it. (Over
time, a less expensive option might be a set of Zuki practice beads that clip onto a
music stand, which I bought on the suggestion of my daughter's private teacher —
and these have been a big hit as well.)

Also, if you're having trouble coaxing your child into practicing, try doing it at a
different time of day. In our house, the mood, and the amount of stuff we could
accomplish in less than 10 minutes changed really dramatically when we switched
from practicing in the early evenings to getting it done before school. Admittedly,
our mornings are a bit more harried (like anyone wants that!), but for us it's paid off
in spades. On the inevitable days when we wind up having to practice in the
evenings, it's nearly always pretty hideous for all involved. But that's just my child's
circadian rhythm. Your mileage may vary.

A couple of other things I've learned as a parent: Instead of packing up the violin
after each day's practice, we leave the instrument and bow out all the time (albeit
in a safe place), so that as our daughter goes about her day, she can pick it up
and play whenever she likes. This way, it's as easy to grab as a book or a toy. And
at the end of a practice session, we try to leave a bit of time for her play whatever
she wants, usually her own improvisations. She also likes to play along with
whatever music we've got going on the stereo, including broadcasts of From the
Top; it's blissful cacophony.

But once a child hits a certain age, parents have to start turning the responsibility
of practicing over to the budding musician. Judy Merritt, the mother of double
bassist Edward Merritt (who appeared on From the Top in 2004), says that as her
son grew older, the nature of practicing changed, as did her role: "Practicing went
through phases because at first it was a Suzuki approach, which requires active
parental involvement on all levels. Every evening was practice that we structured
as parents until our children, Ted and Emma, were around age 12. At that point,
they took over."

"By age 10 or 11, the child needs to learn that what you put in is what you get out.
What your parents put in, you don't get out," says pianist Hilda Huang. "Have the
child practice for however long he can concentrate or feel like he's accomplished
something. Even better would be to have a goal, like 'I want to be able to play this
passage by the time I finish practicing.' For the beginner, 10 focused minutes is
perfectly acceptable. Older, more serious or experienced students might say they
want to learn 10 lines of music, and maybe 40 minutes would do the job."