There is a photo I will never delete from my phone. My son — small, maybe five years old? — standing on our coffee table with his trombone, eyes closed, completely lost in the music.
He wasn’t supposed to be on the coffee table. But I had made a judgment call: I could spend the next twenty minutes fighting him back to the music stand, or I could turn the coffee table into a stage and let him pretend he was Trombone Shorty performing for a crowd. I chose the stage. And he practiced. Happily. For longer than I asked him to.
Here’s what I learned from that moment, and from many more like it over the years: kids don’t resist practice because they don’t love music. They resist practice because practice — in the way we often think about it — doesn’t feel like music. It feels like work. It feels like rules and repetition and sitting still when everything in their body wants to move. Continue reading “When Practice Feels Stuck: Piano Practice Ideas for Kids That Actually Work”
