Kids and music lessons: why do many promising players quit early?

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Disclosure: I'm one of the survivors, as are both of my kids. I started classical cello lessons in 4th grade, and just kept going, though 50 years later I'm a jazz bassist. My kids started on string lessons, and are both good classical musicians today.

In my view there's no silver bullet that will reduce the attrition rate for kids learning to play music, and I think no reason to believe that classical lessons are even significantly better or worse than any other approach.

As mentioned in the article, being part of a musical family helps, but is not a silver bullet. The musician parents tend to be more laid back about it, more patient about progress, less focused on competition. Very few of them express an interest in their kids pursuing music careers, though it sometimes happens anyway. Most just talk about the lifelong enjoyment of music.

Every instrument has a unique learning curve. Yeah, the violin. Guitar and piano are no easier to play at a high level, but can at least produce a decent tone from the beginning.

One thing that might help a bit is starting kids younger, before they are old enough to be self conscious about sucking. Those kids also get chances to play with other kids, and everybody applauds.

I have no aspirations of a music career, but I do get paid to play, and my main band has a small but loyal following. If you have a day job, as I do, you can pick and choose among different aspects of the music business. For instance I have no interest in making or selling recordings, touring, or being famous. I do expect to play with fairly high caliber musicians.

Yup, same with sports. "You're gonna thank me later" they said.

"You're gonna understand when you grow up" they said.

NOPE

> It's like trying to go up an escalator that's going down, if you stop you come back to point 0.

I think it's more nuanced than that, you don't go back to zero, the decay is exponential so the drop is most brutal at the front of the curve:

My experience with skill acquisition, you have to hit a checkpoint and bed it in while in a learning phase.

Eg Now that I grok cycling/skiing/wakeboarding, I can take years away from those and will be able to find my way around without starting from scratch.

Even after a decade of not speaking Mandarin, I decayed massively but didn't go back to zero even though I really had lost so much vocab and fluency.

My takeaway after really honing the skill of learning itself is that it's most efficient to learn in super intensive bursts, especially if you don't expect to be able to keep up frequent practice.

Skiing is probably the most relatable skill that many people learn but rarely practice. Living in a foreign country and learning the local language is another example.

Bringing it back to music, after taking almost 8 years out of the piano my scales didn't really drop below 150bpm for quavers but I was able to get to 250+ in a single focused practise session. Skill reacquisition is very fast, which is why weight lifters always report that getting back to PB is considerably faster second time around (weightlifting low-key being the skill of muscle recruitment)

I have heard it said that most people that have a life-long love of playing music can either play by ear, or sight read. We started our sprout on Suzuki-method violin at an early age, and I learned a whooooole lot about how to teach skills (not just music) from that. We had an excellent violin teacher. First of all, it has to be fun. It is more important that practice be fun every day, than it cover all the assigned material every day. It must be kept fun. And incremental -- the teaching points are introduced gradually so that nothing is frustratingly difficult. Just keep having fun every day, and emphasize playing well and correctly, not on racing through more material for the sake of some kind of false progress.

The early stages of Suzuki-method, of course, emphasize ear training. When the kid reaches 6 or so (early reading stage), they also start to learn to read music -- and by then they are likely playing Vivaldi concertos, learned by ear, so ear-training is well established. Eventually my kiddo also learned to sight-read.

But throughout -- it has to be kept fun. Yeah a constant diet of classical is great for teaching skills, but you want to use those skills on fun stuff. The lucky thing about violin is the huge body of traditional fiddle music from several cultures, and also jazz fiddle. And the local Suzuki teachers put on a weekend fiddle camp every year that was hugely fun as a camp experience over-and-above the music activities.

Anyway, kid developed life-long love of music, still plays pretty much every day, after coming home from day-job as an engineer.