I’m still a brand new mom.  My daughter hasn’t quite approached her first birthday yet.  I’m also still a fairly new piano teacher.  What I am loving as I learn teaching and mothering is how often I can transfer lessons learned from one role to the other role!

From teaching piano, I have learned to have WAY more patience than I thought possible.  And wouldn’t you know it…the same thing is required in parenting!  Patience in piano teaching means allowing students to take as long as they need to figure out that note, calmly explaining a concept again and again, explaining a mistake instead of just hastily showing how to do something. 

Patience in mothering an almost-one year old means allowing her to take as long as she needs to feed herself dinner, calmly putting on her socks that she has removed again and again, explaining nicely why we don’t grab fistfuls of hair from the cat. 

From teaching piano, I have learned the value of a compliment and encouragement.  A discouraged student  can quickly be steered in a more positive direction with a compliment of how nicely he/she ended a piece or how that one section is really coming along (even though the rest of the piece is remaining painfully stagnant).  A student who is already feeling good can quickly be made to feel even better when given a sincere compliment.  And the result that almost always comes after loads of encouragement is a better performing student. 

An almost-one year old who is about to do something naughty can quickly be steered in a better behaved direction if talked to in a positive way.  An almost-one year old who is already being well behaved and wonderful can be encouraged to continue in that direction with more positive talk (and lots of love).

And the absolute worst way to get positive results from a piano student or an almost-one year old?  Tell them NO, DON’T DO THAT.

What parenting lessons have you learned from teaching piano?