It is more than behaviors that affect children. Parent beliefs are of prime importance. Your child will only achieve what you believe he can achieve. The fact that so many children and music dropouts points to the fact that most parents don’t believe they can succeed.
Let me give you an example.
Somewhere between the ages of 10 and 24 months, every child with normal physiology learns to walk. Now, walking represents the most tremendous fate of balance and coordination of many different muscle groups. We don’t know precisely when each child will walk. Some are earlier and some are later. Yet, no parent has the slightest doubt that their child will succeed at walking.
Why?
Well, for starters, everyone they see succeeded at walking. That is, there are plenty of role models for perfect walking and the child himself believes that he will walk. Let’s consider our input into this process.
The infant is at the stage where he is cruising around holding onto the furniture. He has his legs wide apart to help with balance, arms stretched out wide. He lets go of the couch and takes his first faltering step across the room and inevitably falls.
After the child has fallen a hundred times, what does the parent do? Does he say, “Oh, you lost it. You’re a failure. You’re no good at walking. You’ll never walk. This child obviously doesn’t have the gene for walking. He doesn’t have any talent. Quick! Someone order a wheelchair because this child simply isn’t any good at walking.”
On the contrary, every faltering effort is praised with oohs and aaahs. You rush to the phone and tell grandmother, “Little Johnny just took his first step!” You make a tremendous fuss of the child and encourage and praise and encourage. Is it any wonder that the child walks?
But somewhere down the track, we forget how to encourage the growth of a complex skill.
No one had to teach us how to encourage our child to learn to walk because we firmly believed each would learn. We had no doubt that our child would walk perfectly.
The principle is exactly the same.
If we truly believe that our child can succeed at music and apply the principles of training, then our child will succeed.
Do you really believe that your child can learn music or in your heart of hearts, do you really think that there is some special gene that some have and your family missed out on? I can tell you there is no special gene, no special talent that some have and some haven’t. Success in music is nurtured from the time the child is in the womb and every day of his life.
*This is Part 2 of a series of articles about how to succeed in music