Parents–Getting Your Kid Motivated About Guitar
This is sort of a companion blog to my recent blog about getting kids to practice. In that essay I offered a few tips on how to motivate your young virtuoso to practice regularly. It takes work and committment on both your part and your child’s. Guitar is harder to fall into naturally than piano for young ones, maybe because you have the added challenge of having to press down strings, which can be tough on the fingers. Pushing it a LITTLE bit each day is the key to success. Leaving your eight-year-old to his own devices is wasting your money…like hoping he’ll take to doing his chores regularly. Wouldn’t THAT be great???
One of the biggest annoyances to me as a guitar teacher is when I ask a student what kind of music they like and they don’t know. Being put on the spot by a grownup–especially a stranger–can put them in a shyness mode that temporarily blanks their minds. So I start mentioning some famous rock bands and when I hit on their favorites they light up. Or if I mention one they hate (Hannah Montana to the boys) they cringe!
I’m talking about the kids who have no clue about any band, much less ones with cool guitar. 90+% of the kids have heard “Smoke on the Water”, “Crazy Train”, “Sunshine of Your Love” (they’re more hip to the old stuff than they’ll admit) or some Beatles songs. The remaining ten percent gives me a blank stare when I mention every name I can think of.
No radio.
No Mtv (probably a good thing these days).
No background music played by the parents.
They couldn’t name a famous band if their lives depended on it!
I took Karate lessons when I was a kid. Six months later this movie came out, The Karate Kid–not to mention all those bad ninja...