Tiger parent? Nope. I’m a parent who believes in the power of quitting

Feeling like this? Maybe it's time to quit. Photo / Getty

My daughter has been taking piano lessons for the past two years, and it fills me with joy when I think about how far she has come. I will never forget the pride I felt last year, at her first-ever concert, when she walked to the piano, bowed adorably, then flawlessly played a complex song she had been struggling with in practice, leading the mother of a much older girl, a brilliant pianist, to say my daughter reminded her of her own at that age.

But moments like that have been tempered by the pleading, cajoling, arguing, crying and yelling that has taken place most mornings, some afternoons and on occasional weekends over the last two years, when we would tell her it was time to practise piano and she would tell us it wasn’t.

Even when she got up to the piano, it would often take a long time for anything to happen, and when it did happen, it would be followed by a long pause before anything else happened. She would demand my wife sit with her, which would take half an hour or more out of my wife’s day, time she didn’t have, most of which she would spend saying, “Come on, darling!”

It was not that we were tiger parents, far from it. Our daughter was only doing piano because she had requested to, over and over, until we gave in. For the last few months, we had several times suggested to her that maybe it was time to quit, but even when she was at her most practice-resistant, she furiously rejected that idea. Sometimes, she appeared to be crying two separate sets of tears simultaneously – one at having to practise piano and another at the suggestion she should quit.

For the good of everyone’s mental health and the practical requirements of our busy household, we took the decision out of her hands. My wife texted me at work to tell me the news. She’d discussed it with the piano teacher, who’d agreed it was for the best.

I imagined our daughter would burst into tears when we told her, but she didn’t. To be fair, we told her she could start again later in the year, even though we knew that was both statistically improbable and also not in anyone’s best interests.

I took the news much harder. As with the loss of anything that has been part of my life, good or bad, for a long period of time, it brought with it a cacophony of emotion. I was grieving, I suppose, for the skills and qualities (persistence, appreciation of beauty, creativity) I believed my daughter might have learned from piano, and for the type of person piano might have helped her become, but now never would. She would not play a concerto at one of the world’s great concert halls, nor a moderately complex piece in a community hall, nor even Great Balls of Fire for a bunch of drunk fighter pilots in the desert.

But we couldn’t have gone on. Every week, at her lesson, her teacher would give her a list of things she was supposed to practise: songs, exercises, scales; and although she repeatedly told us she wanted to do piano, the picture in her head of what “doing piano” meant appeared not to include any of those things.

The day before we decided she would quit, I had read a New York Times article about the difference between achievement and accomplishment. As defined by the article’s author, Adam Gopnik, achievement is the fulfilment of tasks imposed by others, while accomplishment is a sense of fulfilment that comes from within when we’re absorbed in a task.

Gopnik quoted his sister, renowned developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, as saying: “If we taught our kids softball the way we teach them science, they would hate softball as much as they hate science, but if we taught them science as we teach them softball, by practice and absorption, they might love both.”

The weekend after our daughter quit, my wife downloaded an app that teaches piano by turning it into a game. That weekend was the first time I’d seen our daughter sit down at the piano without hours of parental exhortation, threats and/or bribery. It was also the first time I’d seen her practise without stopping every minute or so to complain it was too hard.

On Monday, I was shocked to see her come out of her room in the morning dressed for school, with her bag packed – tasks that, on an average day, take between an hour and 90 minutes of parental nagging. She ate breakfast without prompting, then went straight to the piano, where she logged into the app and practised without complaint. She stopped, begrudgingly, after an hour, only because her sister, who had never before shown an interest in piano, had suddenly become desperate to learn.