Our family loves music. Our house on any one given day is like a mini conservatorium, filled with the sounds of a saxophone, piano, guitar or flute floating through our rooms. Our poor neighbours.
I am ever so grateful that my Mum as a single parent also afforded me the opportunity to learn as a child and though I never went anywhere formally with my music, still today love to play as a creative outlet and have great fun with our music team playing at church.
For this reason, I wanted to give my children the 'gift of music'. We all know the financial and time costs, also the balance of desire & discipline involved; of not wanting it to become 'forced', rather an encouraged extra curricular activity in a hope that it can become a natural love for our children.
Today's story is about, Deep Waters, who plays the piano and has done for 7 years now, he is currently working towards his grade 6 AMEB exam and though loves his music now, it has been a struggle many times to keep him interested and engaged.
When he first began he used to cry practising and I felt like a horrible mother strongly encouraging him to practise. Deep Waters has the perfect personality for piano - he loves a challenge and is good at concentrating, attention to detail. I used to agonise over the balance between, parental persistence and encouragement, not to give up too early and feeling like I was coercing him to hang in there. I am glad that we persisted. He has since thanked me several times for 'forcing' him to hang in there. And to hear him play today, brings such incredible beauty and joy to my soul, and he has a deep sense of achievement.
I would not force all of my children though - it's been a deliberate choice with Deep Waters (DW). Knowing his personality and his natural aversion to new things, have always found that DW needed to be gently persuaded, 'forced' to do many things, ice skating, talking on the phone, getting a hair cut, going out, visiting family..... DW is a home body, loves his own time, very self content, avoids confrontation, likes routine.
Sunshine on the other hand, was playing the flute and also crying when practising. She begged me to let her simply focus on her dancing. So I let her quit, only to have her of her own volition pick up the flute one year later and start playing again. So each child is different.
Deep Water's piano teacher calls him a, 'music machine', a natural talent as he will do anything that she stills him to do! So I felt quite strongly not to let him quit, a sense of responsibility to foster his natural talent and to ride the waves and find creative ways to encourage him to hang in there. Exhausting & tedious at times and it would certainly have been 'easier' to just let him quit, however our persistence has yielded results.
He wanted to quit last year again - typical grade 9 boy stuff, wrestling with his identity, not wanting to be associated with 'gay piano', says DW. However again knowing his personality, knowing how much he respected his teacher, knowing he wouldn't want to disappoint her, said he was welcome to quit, but he must be the one to tell his teacher, I would not do it for him.
He couldn't bring himself to tell her. So today he is still playing, and loving it this year! Again I am grateful we rode the waves, pushed past the pain and indecision and have a Mozart in the making.
As parents we all wrestle with these issues, from music, to dancing to sport to whatever, do we encourage them to persist when they want to quit, or do we help them overcome the natural inclination to give up when things get tough? I think it's individual, consider their personality, consider the long term benefits, consider what is best for them. Cherish your children..............
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