What kind of parents make their kids play piano?
Daily Comfort ZoneFrom Psychology Today:
… A recent study in Frontiers of Psychology (Corrigall and Schellenberg, 2015), identified the characteristics most likely to predict parents who encourage music study in their children, and the characteristics most likely to predict children who stick with music study.
Using the Big Five Personality Inventory, the researchers found that parents who score high on the openness scale are most likely to encourage their children to study music. Openness is defined as being curious, creative, intelligent, and interested in novel ideas. Although openness also predicts children who tend to want to study music, it is not an essential quality. Openness becomes a more important factor as the child becomes an adolescent, and chooses to continue music study without parental guidance.
More here.
As a child, I kept to myself and stayed indoors to read and listen to music. My parents considered this to be the equivalent of doing nothing, and so I was made to take piano lessons.
My parents would have scored less than zero on the so-called “openness scale”.
Let’s ask Lang Lang, shall we?
If I had a quid for every person who says their one regret is giving up learning piano (or other musical instrument) I’d be a billionaire.
Like learning languages, or riding etc it’s very hard to learn as an adult and it will never become second nature as it does if you learn as a child.
I am grateful to my parents for refusing to let me give up – Lang Lang I ain’t but I still get a lot of pleasure from it – and my daughter feels the same.
There is potentially a difference between ‘parents who encourage their children to study music’ (the report) and ‘parents who make their kids play the piano’ (your headline).
Right. And yet another difference between kids who play a musical instrument (and/or are made to do so) and those who go on to be greatly accomplished at it as prodigies.
But even there, it’s not as if one master pattern explains it all. There was a huge difference between Yehudi Menuhin’s parents and Ruggiero Ricci’s.
This kind of study embodies a certain type of reductive thinking often practiced by these researchers, as if such issues could be neatly delineated in specific themes or qualities, when the reality is that this phenomenon is in fact multi-factorial and profoundly determined by societal and cultural norms. How does one define — and measure — “openness”? It’s obviously a very subjective notion open to a wide range of interpretations. Is it even measurable? Of course not — at least not in the “scientific” sense such studies attempt to portray it. It seems these researchers may have a very poor hands-on, direct experience of the actual topic they are addressing. If they did, they would understand that for many parents who push their children into music, there often is a competitive and sometimes even narcissistic dimension to such “encouragement,” as the parent often lives vicariously through the child’s accomplishments, which may well turn out to be unhealthy — if not outright detrimental to psychological development. It’s all in the very manner such “encouragement” is being conducted. It’s perfectly fine to introduce a child to something new — however a problem emerges when, as in many of these cases, the child is put under premature pressure to perform and compete. Then it’s no longer a question of “openness,” but of keeping up with the competition, and there is no shortage of very talented kids out there — which makes such competition much steeper, and which is also why we are now seeing a level of piano playing perhaps unlike at any time in history (at least on a technical level), as what used to be considered unplayable repertoire a couple of decades ago has now become standard fare for some of these young players who seem to have no technical limits whatsoever — and frankly, their artistry often suffers as a result, but that’s another topic altogether. But for most kids who are being”encouraged” to start an instrument by a pushy parent, it’s not a question of openness, it’s frankly a question of keeping up with the Joneses, i.e. with other parents and their respective kids, although an argument could be made that learning an instrument do teach the invaluable lesson of discipline, but it must be done properly and with extreme care — otherwise such “encouragement” may easily backfire later in life.
Well that explains why musicians who actually play are usually open minded and liberal yet the listeners on slippedisc are closed minded and conservative…meaning they probably don’t play 😀 (I’m just teasing)
There’s a big difference between encouraging your child to play the piano and making your child play the piano. Encouragement is good. Force doesn’t work.