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/