Your Child Wants to Quit Music. Now What?
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
There is some comfort in knowing parents were apparently being blamed for everything long before social media. Parenting may be the most important job in the world for which there is no reliable instruction manual, very little formal training, constantly changing requirements, and a customer who will eventually explain, in considerable detail, everything you did wrong.
And yet we do it. We encourage. We worry. We drive them to lessons, rehearsals, games, and performances. We pay for instruments, equipment, and accessories we did not know existed until someone explained that our child absolutely needed one. Then, one afternoon, your child announces, “I want to quit.” Welcome to parenting.
For parents of young musicians, this can be an especially difficult moment. Music does not always reward a child immediately. Progress happens slowly. There are plateaus and frustrating weeks when seemingly nothing works. A video game may congratulate you every thirty seconds. A guitar will happily allow you to play the same wrong note for six months.
The question is not simply whether your child wants to quit. Do they actually want to quit, or do they simply want the difficulty to stop? Those are not the same thing. A child may genuinely discover that guitar, piano, dance, baseball, or some other activity is not for them. Children should be allowed to discover who they are. But sometimes “I don’t like this anymore” really means “I don’t like being bad at this,” “This used to be easy,” or “I haven’t made progress lately.” All of those feelings are real. None necessarily mean it is time to quit.
Parents have a difficult role here. Encourage without controlling, expect effort without turning practice into a fight, and recognize real unhappiness without teaching children that discomfort is always a reason to stop – that is a narrow road, and most of us occasionally drive into the ditch. One of the easiest mistakes sounds like this: “I am paying for these lessons, and you are going to practice.”
From the parent’s perspective, that makes perfect sense. From the child’s perspective, something else can begin happening. The guitar is no longer the guitar. The guitar is now the thing Mom and Dad yell about. Eventually the child says, “I hate guitar.” Most of the time they do not hate guitar. They hate fighting about guitar practice.
That is why, particularly with beginners, build the habit of practice before becoming obsessed with the duration. Fifteen focused minutes can accomplish a great deal. For a child, even tuning the guitar each day can be difficult, and a win. The goal is to let them experience a basic cycle: Practice = Improvement = Better Performance = Pride and Self-Confidence. Once young musicians experience that enough times, they begin to trust the process. Eventually, they begin motivating themselves.
Parents do not need to become the practice police. Ask questions instead. What are you learning? What is difficult right now? Show me something you could not do a month ago. Listen to them. Attend performances. Celebrate progress. Treat the work as meaningful. Then let the teacher do much of the technical evaluation. Your child already has a teacher. They still need a parent in the audience.
Somewhere along the way, however, I think our modern approach to education has become confused about one word: fun. Of course children should have fun. Music should contain joy, creativity, excitement, friendship, and moments when a student suddenly realizes, “I can actually do this.” But fun cannot be the sole purpose of the experience.
Sometimes I imagine taking the philosophy of “if it isn’t fun, stop doing it” back to ancient Egypt. The Great Pyramid is under construction. A worker is moving an enormous block of stone under the Egyptian sun. He stops and announces, “This isn’t fun anymore.” Management gathers. There is concern. Perhaps he needs a different stone. Maybe a smaller stone. Perhaps today should be Pyramid Fun Day. Someone suggests snacks. Another worker reports that he no longer enjoys geometry. Construction is suspended. Five thousand years later, tourists arrive and admire a five-foot-high pile of rocks.
The point is obviously not that music education should resemble forced labor in ancient Egypt. Please do not quote me as advocating Pharaoh-based guitar instruction! The point is that anything worth building eventually becomes difficult. Fighting with a child will not build a lasting relationship with music, but teaching a child to quit whenever something stops being immediately satisfying will not build one either. Somewhere between those extremes is where real education lives.
Music requires something increasingly difficult to teach: discipline. You cannot swipe past the difficult part of learning or scroll around the months required to develop coordination. There is no “skip ad” button for frustration. A difficult song, a bad performance, an audition that did not go well, or trying something ten times and succeeding on the eleventh are not evidence that something has gone wrong. They teach a young person how to prepare, recover, tolerate frustration, and continue.
Our job is not to remove difficulty from our children’s lives but to help them discover that difficulty can be overcome. So before allowing a student to quit, find out what is actually wrong. Has progress stalled? Is the material too difficult? Too easy? Where is the child developmentally? If the teacher doesn’t know, find one who does. Do they need a new song, a performance, a group, a different challenge or goal? Sometimes what appears to be a motivation problem is really a progress problem. Fix the progress problem, and motivation often returns.
This does not mean a child can never stop playing an instrument. They may eventually decide that music is not something they want to pursue. That is very different from learning to walk away whenever learning becomes difficult. You cannot pull on a plant to make it grow faster. You provide the right conditions and give it time. Children are much the same.
Eventually, what you hope to hear is something much more important than a perfect chord: “I can do difficult things.” Your child does not need to play Carnegie Hall or become a pro. They may put the guitar in its case someday and go years without playing. But the listening, coordination, memory, creativity, pattern recognition, and discipline involved in making music do not simply disappear.
Perhaps that is the real goal. Not simply raising a musician, but raising a young person who understands that meaningful things take time, frustration can be survived, and effort changes ability. And someday, after years of doing your best, your grown child may still explain all the mistakes you made raising them. Oscar Wilde warned us. If we are very lucky, perhaps eventually they will forgive us.
And if, somewhere along the way, they learned not to run from every difficult thing they encounter, we probably did something right.
