How much practice does a child actually need?

Every parent asks this, and most answers are useless. "As much as they can" helps nobody. "Thirty minutes a day" is wrong for a five-year-old and wrong again for a fifteen-year-old.

Here is an honest answer, by age - and then the part that matters more than the number.

By age, roughly

Five to seven years old: ten to fifteen minutes, most days. A child of this age cannot concentrate usefully for longer, and forcing it teaches them that the instrument is a punishment.

Eight to ten: twenty to thirty minutes. By now a child can hold an idea across a whole session and work at something rather than simply playing through.

Eleven to thirteen: thirty to forty-five minutes. This is usually when a student either becomes genuinely independent at the instrument or quietly stops.

Fourteen and above: forty-five minutes to an hour and a half, and more when an examination or performance is close.

These are starting points, not rules. A committed nine-year-old may do more than a reluctant thirteen-year-old, and that is fine.

The number is not the point

Six days of fifteen minutes will beat one day of ninety, every time and without exception. The instrument is learned by the hands and the ear, and both need frequent, short exposure rather than occasional long ones.

A child who practises daily for ten minutes is building something. A child who practises once a week for an hour is starting again each time.

If you take only one thing from this: protect the frequency before you extend the length.

What practice actually is

Most children, left alone, play their pieces from beginning to end, enjoy the parts they can already do, stumble at the same bar, and stop. That is not practice. That is performance with mistakes in it.

Practice is finding the difficult bar, playing it slowly, playing it again, and again, until it is no longer difficult. It is unglamorous, and it is the whole thing.

Teaching a child to practise is a large part of what a teacher is for. It is not obvious, and no child arrives knowing how.

What a parent should do

Sit nearby, at least at the beginning. Not correcting - you may not know what is correct - but present. Young children practise better with an adult in the room, and it need not be an adult who plays.

Ask what their teacher asked them to work on, and ask them to show you that bar rather than the whole piece.

Keep the time fixed. The same slot each day removes the daily argument about whether it is happening.

Do not use the instrument as a punishment or a bargaining chip. A child who is sent to the piano when they misbehave learns exactly the wrong association.

When it goes wrong

Almost every student stops wanting to practise at some point. It is not a sign that music was a mistake.

Usually it means one of three things: the music is too hard and they feel stupid, the music is too easy and they are bored, or nothing is coming next that they care about. All three are for the teacher to fix, and all three are fixable.

Tell us. We would far rather adjust the repertoire than lose a student who was, underneath it, perfectly happy playing.