Why reminding is not the same as motivating

I had a student — I’ll call her Noor — who came to every lesson with her sheet music neatly packed, always ready at the agreed time, and knew exactly which piece we’d be working on. Her mother sent me a message every Friday: “She practised three times, Thursday was hard but she finished.”

After six months I asked Noor directly: did she actually enjoy it? She looked at me as if I’d said something strange. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just do what mum says.”

That was the moment I understood what was really going on.

Noor wasn’t unmotivated. She wasn’t lazy or difficult either. She had become entirely dependent on an external system to get moving. The motivation to practise didn’t live in her — it lived in her mother. And that system worked well, on paper. Just not in the way that matters.

What disappears when the reminder comes from outside

Motivation has an address. It lives somewhere. And when parents consistently provide the reminder — “have you practised yet?”, “are you going to sit at the piano?”, “your teacher said you need to repeat that transition” — the motivation increasingly lives outside the child. It has to be delivered from outside every time, like a package that’s always dropped off but never actually stored.

The strange thing is this doesn’t immediately look like a problem. The child practises. Progress is there. Lessons go fine. But you see it when the parent isn’t around for a bit, or when they go on holiday, or when the student gets older and you expect them to plan independently. Then suddenly there’s nothing. Not because the motivation disappeared — it was never in the right place to begin with.

The difference between providing for and ensuring that

There’s something I try to show parents when they ask me how they can help. It sits in the distinction between providing for something and ensuring that something happens.

Providing for means: you make sure the instrument is in tune, there’s time in the week, the child doesn’t give up halfway through for logistical reasons. That’s structural support, and it’s genuinely valuable.

Ensuring that means: you make sure the child practises. You are the engine. You remember, you remind, you check.

The second looks like the first, but it’s fundamentally different. The first clears the path. The second walks it for them.

A child who waits for a parent’s cue isn’t learning to practise. They’re learning to wait.

What I see in students who carry it themselves

The students who end up enjoying music the most — not necessarily the most talented, but the ones who keep going longest and get the most out of it — have something in common. At some point they became the owner of their own practice.

That’s not about age. I have nine-year-olds who track what they want to learn themselves, and fifteen-year-olds who still need a parent chasing them every time. It connects to how early ownership was left with them. Not handed over — just left.

The strange thing is you can’t force or explain that ownership into existence. It grows in the space you leave. If you provide the Friday-evening reminder every week, you fill that space. There’s then no reason for the child to remember themselves — because you’ll do it anyway.

How I raise this with parents

I don’t say it as criticism, because it isn’t criticism. Parents who remind their child to practise do so out of care. They want it to work. They don’t want their child walking into a lesson unprepared, or feeling like the money spent was wasted.

But I do try to show them something: every reminder you give is one your child doesn’t learn to give themselves. That sounds strict. It’s actually an invitation to let go of something that’s tiring — for both of them.

What I then ask them: try going two weeks without reminding. Say nothing about it. See what happens. Not as punishment, not as an experiment with a predetermined outcome, but as space.

Sometimes a week passes where the child barely practises. That’s information. Then we know something. Then we can talk in the lesson: what makes it hard? Is it the piece? The schedule? Is the child taking on too much? Then something can be adjusted.

But if you keep reminding, that information disappears. You only see the result, not the reason.

What this means for me as a teacher

I can’t fix this from the lesson. I see a student for an hour a week, sometimes less. What happens at home largely determines what’s possible in the lesson. And if the home situation is organised in a way that the child never gets the chance to fail on their own terms and recover on their own terms, there’s a limit to what I can achieve.

That’s not pessimism. It’s a reason to have the conversation — early, kindly, concretely.

With Noor it took time. Her mother found it genuinely difficult to let go. She was used to her daughter performing well and the reminder was a proven instrument for that. But a few months later she sent me something remarkable: “Noor asked me yesterday if she could practise an extra fifteen minutes. That’s never happened before.”

I still think about it sometimes: what had she been missing all those years if that had never been released?

When did you last explain to a parent the difference between supporting and taking over — and how did that conversation go?