Parents are obsessed with talent. Elizabeth Faidley doesn't mean mildly interested—she means obsessed. And if you're listening, there's an 80% chance you are too.

In this episode of It's More Than the Violin, Elizabeth introduces her taxonomy of the seven parents she's met over nearly 30 years of teaching—Blythe (who is "very relaxed" and definitely has a spreadsheet), Balthazar (who just wants his son to enjoy music, right before asking why he isn't first chair), Cricket (whose child is genuinely extraordinary and has no idea), Persephone (whose six-year-old has had four lessons and needs to discuss summer programs), Steve (whose nine-year-old "owns the process" in the same way she owns the apartment), Petunia (whose daughter is "behind" some imaginary child on Instagram who may or may not be a 43-year-old accountant named Bob), and Clementine (the dolly parton of musical parents—protect Clementines at all costs).

What all seven eventually want to know is the same thing: is my child talented? And underneath that: how far could she go?

Elizabeth believes in talent—she's seen extraordinary ears, remarkable coordination, children who walk on stage at seven like the audience came to see them, and children who look like they've been kidnapped. But talent, she argues, is not a prophecy. She explores why being talented can make the beginning too easy, why the violin eventually comes for everyone, and why "she's just naturally talented" usually means a child with a staff, a spreadsheet, and several adults having serious conversations about her next piece.

Drawing on Carol Dweck, Anders Ericsson, and her own experience as a recovering Blythe, Elizabeth makes the case that talent is just information—not destiny, not a contract, not a guarantee. It doesn't tell you the ending. Because if your child studies violin for 12 years and becomes a cardiologist, the violin did not fail.

Find Elizabeth here:

Website

https://www.elizabethfaidley.com/

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@FaidleyStudio

Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/faidleystudio

Podcast

https://rss.com/podcasts/its-more-than-the-violin/

If Elizabeth Faidley had a dollar for every time a parent told her "my child doesn't like practicing," she'd never have to teach another G major scale again.

In this episode of It's More Than the Violin, she tackles the panic that follows that sentence—the fear that a child who doesn't want to practice has lost their love of music forever, or that years of scales and metronomes have ruined them. Spoiler: they haven't.

Elizabeth breaks down what practicing actually is, why "playing" and "practicing" are completely different activities, and why an iPad six feet away is always going to win the attention contest. She shares her own childhood practice battles—chasing her mother around the house, screaming matches 35 seconds after promising not to argue, and her father Buster mysteriously disappearing every time the violin case clicked open. She explains why asking "do you want to practice?" is a trap, why children need help with the enormous executive functioning that practice requires, why boredom is not the enemy, and why "I don't want to practice" and "I love music" can absolutely coexist.

Along the way, she offers the good-enough violin parent's guide to surviving practice: keep it routine, don't hold a referendum every afternoon, let them complain, and look at the whole child—not the meltdown at 5:15 on a Wednesday.

Because the goal isn't a child who skips joyfully to the practice room every day. It's a child who learns how to work at something difficult long enough to experience the magic of "I couldn't do this before, and now I can."

Find Elizabeth here:

Website

https://www.elizabethfaidley.com/

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@FaidleyStudio

Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/faidleystudio

Podcast

https://rss.com/podcasts/its-more-than-the-violin/

In this episode of It's More Than the Violin, Elizabeth Faidley takes on one of the most persistent fantasies in music education: the "perfect" student who practices every day, loves scales, finds the metronome comforting, and never complains.

That child, she argues, does not exist—and if she did, Elizabeth wouldn't want to teach her. Drawing on her own humbling experience as a mother who once asked a master teacher how far her nine-year-old cellist daughter could go (only to be told, "I don't know"), Elizabeth explores why talent is far less interesting than what happens the first time a child truly can't do something.

She weaves in psychologist Carol Dweck on growth mindset, Albert Bandura on self-efficacy, Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, Donald Winnicott's "good enough mother," and Angela Duckworth's concept of grit—all to make the case that children are not tiny adults but human beings under construction.

Along the way, she shares stories of students who practice 40% of what she assigns and are shocked she can tell, kids who spend half the lesson on the floor and somehow learn everything, and the brutal, boring, 4,000-hour reality behind every "talented" performance at Carnegie Hall.

Whether your child is the anxious kid, the perfectionist, the comedian, or the one who asks why, this episode is a reassurance: your child is not supposed to be done. They're a child. And that's exactly the point.

Find Elizabeth here:

Website

https://www.elizabethfaidley.com/

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@FaidleyStudio

Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/faidleystudio

Podcast

https://rss.com/podcasts/its-more-than-the-violin/