The families that choose the Oregon Music Academy believe that music lessons should be an enjoyable experience. This includes the idea that at home practice should be a safe time and place for learning and growth. It’s vital to your child’s long term enjoyment and success with music and life that you avoid these top 10 mistakes as a parent.
1. Use practice as a punishment
2. Insist that your child play for other people when they don’t want to
3. Ridicule your child for making mistakes
4. Apologize to your music teacher or other people for your child’s less than perfect playing
5. Insist that your child play an instrument that they do not want to play
6. Start your child on an instrument that is the wrong size or in poor working order
7. Make fun of your child for not going the pace you think they should go
8. Push your child to play music that is not in their current level
9. Step in and teach your child in their lessons. That’s your teacher’s job.
10. Talk negatively about your child in front of your child.
Luckily, we seldom see OMA parents making these mistakes. You’re all GREAT! But occasionally these things do pop up. Nobody’s perfect. If you catch yourself making these mistakes, stop, take a breath, smile, and back away.
On a few extremely rare situations we’ve encountered parents with an entirely different philosophy. For those folks, we do our best to gently explain that OMA is probably not the right place for their family. We know our approach to music works because we’ve seen hundreds of students succeed with it. But it only works when our staff at OMA, your child, and you are all working together in partnership.
What things have you done (or avoided doing) that have helped your kids succeed with music lessons. We’d like to know. Leave us a comment.