Piano Practice

After dinner, my wife often stands next to our 6-year-old daughter for an hour of piano practice. I’m usually back to work upstairs, but I can tell how things are going without seeing them. A melody starts, something sounds wrong, awkwardly stops, then starts again. The same few measures repeat. My daughter gets frustrated, and my wife explains what went wrong. The mistake happens again. Voices get a little louder. Then the crying starts. Usually later that night, there will be a debate between my wife and me about what we’re actually trying to accomplish.

Neither of us plays piano, and maybe there’s some desire to have her fulfill an unfulfilled dream of ours. Maybe it’s my sincere love of Yiruma and Ludovico Einaudi, and the many beautiful pieces I listen to. It hasn’t gone as planned. Now I worry that she will eventually hate piano, or even music. If the goal were instead to develop her love of music, maybe we would do almost the opposite: let her play only when she feels like it and stop when it stops being fun.

Both of us know that won’t work either. It’s so easy to give up, and we want her to have the grit that develops from daily routine and discipline.

Passion overrated? Agency is the right word?

We’re told all the time to find our passion. Passion sounds like a thing deeply buried somewhere within us, waiting to be uncovered. It feels authentic, and it has this power that, when you really love something, nobody has to keep reminding you to do it.

But I can’t decide for my daughter to develop a passion for piano. Even as an adult, I can’t simply choose what I’ll become deeply interested in. Otherwise I would be playing “River Flows in You” masterfully, like I’ve envisioned many, many times in my head. Passion feels more like a source of energy that comes and goes. Sometimes it develops only after we become good enough at something to enjoy it, and sometimes it may disappear altogether.

Agency feels different to me. I think of it as the growing sense that I can choose a direction, do something about it, run into difficulty, adjust, and keep going. Agency feels more cultivatable.

As a parent, partner, and manager, I often want to create passion in another person. Maybe the better goal is to help cultivate enough agency in the people around me that, when something does matter to them, they have enough inner fire to reach for it.

Scaffolding: lending them abilities before they develop their own

My daughter doesn’t yet have all the tools needed to practice piano well on her own. When she plays a difficult measure five times and gets it wrong five times, she usually doesn’t know what to change. She certainly isn’t thinking, This frustration might mean I’m working at the edge of my ability, not that I’m bad at piano.

Those are things adults learn over time. And our job might simply be to let her borrow them from us first. “It’s your choice, practice however you want,” doesn’t necessarily create agency. It can also be us withdrawing support before she knows what to do without it.

She can often use guidance to do something before she can do it independently. We are here to provide enough support now, then slowly remove it as she becomes capable of taking over. Scaffolding might be the right phrase.

So when my daughter can’t regulate her frustration, maybe we lend her some of our calm. When she doesn’t know how to break down a problem, we show her how. When she wants to quit the moment something becomes uncomfortable, we don’t always let that feeling make the decision for her.

And this only works if the support eventually goes away. Ten years from now, if we still have to stand beside the piano telling her how long to practice, that would be a failure on our part.

Difficulty has a role, and suffering isn’t the goal

Thinking this way has also changed how I look at frustration. I’m no longer a new parent, but I still have the tendency to remove unnecessary suffering from my children’s lives. I’m working on having the mindfulness not to do that automatically.

The opposite extreme is tough love all the way, treating hardship as automatically virtuous: push through, don’t quit, nothing worthwhile comes easily. Some difficulty teaches us. Some is just pointless.

Frustration can teach my daughter useful things during piano practice. A passage that felt impossible can become playable if she slows it down, works on one hand, or repeats two measures until she masters them. She gets to see that her actions can change the outcome. But an hour-long fight where she feels helpless, my wife is angry, and everyone leaves exhausted may be teaching something else entirely. We all know the risk of her associating piano with conflict and loss of control.

I want to help her make sense of it. That connection between effort, strategy, and improvement seems important. It may be one of the earliest ways she learns, through experience rather than explanation, that she can affect what happens next. The same is true for us. We are trying to make sense of it from the other side.

Competence before passion

“Everyone hates their job, right?”

“Interest has to come first.”

You like something, so you spend time on it. Because you spend time on it, you become good.

But is there ever a kid who loves piano practice right when they start?

I’m not sure life always works in that order. Sometimes a child struggles through the awkward early stage of learning, gets a little better, experiences the satisfaction of being able to do something she couldn’t do before, and only then starts to enjoy it.

Competence can come before passion, and can ground passion.

Competence also gives her more real choices. Once she knows what productive practice feels like, she can decide what she wants to become good at. Autonomy becomes more meaningful after we have developed some ability to act on it.

Parents have enormous control over a child’s life. We model how we approach life, choose schools, activities, schedules, vacations, and much of the environment they grow up in. It would be easy to use that control to produce visible results. But is today’s structure creating tomorrow’s independence? A parent holds the bicycle, runs beside it for a while, and eventually lets go.

The same pattern exists at work. A manager can tell an engineer what to do and often get a good result. Sometimes that level of direction is necessary, especially when someone is new. But if the relationship is healthy, the manager gradually transfers judgment along with responsibility.

The scaffolding matters, but only because it makes the handoff possible.

What kind of person are we trying to raise?

All of this confusion and reflection leads me to a question: what are we actually hoping for from our kids?

I find myself caring more about how my daughters eventually relate to life itself. I hope they can encounter something difficult without immediately deciding they aren’t capable. I hope they can tell the difference between something worth struggling for and something they don’t need to care about. I hope they can make choices without constantly looking around for approval.

I hope they can become deeply absorbed in something because it matters to them, not because someone told them it should. I also hope they can walk away when a direction no longer feels like their own. Eventually, they will have to decide for themselves what a good life looks like.

We can create conditions. We can introduce children to music, books, sports, people, places, ideas, and challenges. We can teach them ways to deal with frustration. For a while, we can lend them our judgment while theirs is still developing.

We don’t get to choose what will eventually give their lives meaning. The meaning could be the act of living itself, in a pure, solitary form. At some point, the scaffolding has to come down. I have no idea how much my daughter will care about piano in ten years. I still hope it becomes a way for her to express herself and slow down for a moment.

But maybe what matters more is the realization that difficult things can become possible through her own actions, and that frustration is something she can examine rather than automatically obey.

I’m skeptical that everyone has one hidden passion sitting somewhere inside, waiting to be discovered. I doubt passion is something we can, or should, manufacture for another person. I also don’t know how much struggle is useful, or whether hardship really makes us stronger in any reliable way.

Maybe music should be a kind of medicine for that hardship.