Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Controlling parent who will not let up, need support

I think this is quite wrong. This is a reductio ad absurdum that says people are complete prisoners of their personal experiences. I think most people would regard that as nonsense when it comes to the natural sciences. A physicist can understand many things he or she has never personally experienced. Abstract reasoning is sufficient. But when it comes to human interaction, somehow only people who are Javanese supposedly can understand Java. That would imply that Christians should shut up about Islam, and Muslims should never utter a word about Hinduism, and Mormons, well .... so much for ever being able to understand another person.

Yet people actually can understand an awful lot of the situations that other people experience on a daily basis. This is most certainly reinforced by personal experience. The receptionist at a dental office, for instance, is surely used to the wide variety of personality types out there, much like a piano teacher. The strategies one uses to interact successfully with aggressive, controlling, personalities share a lot in common no matter what particular business you operate. I'm sure many a private contractor in home entertainment systems has encountered fathers whose need to control matches the wicked, mental mother in this thread. Those contractors have to work out strategies for dealing with people like this, and I'm dead sure that if you described this mother to them that they would nod in agreement at most of the particulars of the situation.

Please stop thinking that as a piano teacher you are somehow unique and incomprehensible to the rest of the intelligent human race.

OMG. At risk of bringing us further off-topic, this raises a fear of mine. And that is - noticing something really untoward - and wondering if I should call social services. Abandoning a 9 year old makes me really concerned. Cross fingers I never see it.

I totally disagree!

You can explain to me how it feels to be a "MAN" but as a woman, unless I have the structure & plumbing of a man, I will never be a man, & I don't know what it's REALLY like to be a man!

Just for the record, I can guess what it's like to be a MAN, but I like being a WOMAN! Something you can never truly understand!!!!! You can "guess" what it's like to be a woman, but you can never truly know!

Guess all you want, but until you walk in my "stilettos" you can never know what it's like to be a woman! Guess all you want. And yes, piano teacher's are unique!!!!

So you would positively never read a book written by a man if the main protagonist was a woman? A male psychologist should not study gender differences? Well, I guess a female psychologist couldn't study them as well. I guess gender is off the table. No one could ever study it. I'm afraid I find your logic unpersuasive.

My sister teaches parenting. She's not a parent, she has never gotten pregnant, & never raised a child. She has all the certificates she can get to teach mothers all they need to know. She claims to be an "expert" in the field of mothering! She's kidding herself! Unless she becomes a parent, she will never know, never TRULY know all the extras that come with delivery of a child, sleepless nights & unselfish sacrifice of being a TRUE MOTHER!

She's read all the materials, passed all the exams. but she has NO IDEA! She thinks she knows all about it from reading, but SHE HAS NO IDEA what it's like til thast day she become a mother!!! For real!

Fine, you can behave as though don't understand anything outside your little self-imposed intellectual boxes. But "I" will continue to contribute information and ideas about all sorts of things I have never experienced .... like piano teaching!

Yikes!

OK. I think we as piano teachers love parental involvement. I know that it is pretty much impossible to teach a child one day of the week when the other 6 days there is nothing going on. A great parent is a godsend and I actively encourage my parents to give me feedback and share with me their thoughts and feelings.

This is *entirely* different than the frustration being expressed by some teachers here.

It's like you have a plumber come to your house to fix a broken pipe. You tell him what is wrong, where the pipe is, symptoms you are experiencing, etc. That is your feedback. You then let him go about his work. Now if he brings in a chainsaw and start cutting down your wall, commonsense prevails and you go "Hey hold on a second!" - but on the other hand you don't stand beside him for hours and asking for his rationale behind every tool and process.

So in other words, I certainly value what a non-teacher would have to say about piano teaching. Probably they could teach me a lot because you are giving an informed outside perspective. BUT its also true that in another sense, they haven't devoted decades of their life to perfecting pianistic abilities, and taught hundreds and hundreds of students. They don't have firsthand experience of what its like to perfect a craft and try to teach it step by step to someone else.

And yes, everyone has the experience of dealing with agressive/dysfunctional personality types but I think there are some unique qualities about how a teacher has to deal with this. For one thing, a teacher has to decide how to deal with a parent week after week. A teacher has to deal with the fact that the parent is guiding the child the other 167 hours of the week, because all of that plays into the lesson; not just in how the student practices outside of lesson time, but also his or her self-esteem, work ethic, focus, etc. etc. All of this is fairly unique to a teacher-parent-student interaction, and more complex than simply dealing with a difficult customer.

Yes! If it's supportive and not destructive, as in the case presented by the OP.


Well, not exactly. The child is sleeping between 63 and 70 hours of that, and school takes up another 50 - 55 hrs, especially if school buses are involved, leaving parents with a scant 45 - 50 hrs, in which other activities, eating, personal hygiene, homework, family chores, etc., etc., etc. are sapping away time. Parents are beleaguered, naturally, and children are stressed. Teachers, who are involved with students one-on-one for an hour each week often become major confidants. Not surprising that. But I find that students with grandparents near at hand often receive a lot of parenting from them as well. All for the good.

Interesting twists this thread has taken. I'm hoping the OP found some valuable and useful information to take away from the discussion.

This "one thing" could probably branch out into many topics, because it is so huge. Before I start, I want to get one thing out of my system, because I had a spectacularly rotten week, and some parents are truly clueless. They don't hear anything we say because they do not WANT to hear anything we say if it conflicts with "their reality" (read "delusions").

Aside from these impossible parents, and keeping in mind that their are equally clueless teachers (this is a human problem, not a teacher/student problem), it is absolutely true that many parents start their kids in piano lessons knowing nothing about music and nothing about what it takes to master an instrument, even somewhat.

I would love to work only with parents who are knowledgeable about what I do, from the beginning, who are cooperative, supportive, polite, appreciative, etc.

In the real world, the very nicest parents often start out knowing almost nothing about music, and some of the biggest pains in the *** know a lot.

I'll take the parents who are nice and who know nothing, because they are "teachable".

Every year I have a couple students starting whose parents know nothing about what the process is, but because they are good people, otherwise intelligent, they learn very quickly what we are doing *IF* I am careful to explain what I am doing, what they need to do, and HOW to do it. This works best for the tiny kids, because then I have a parent in the room, learning along with the child. By the time the child is ready to take lessons alone, the parent has experienced, first-hand, what the process is all about.

In my experience you can't "educate" parents in one shot. Explaining in lesson one, or in the first few lessons, what needs to happen certainly helps. But there are always new challenges, so in my opinion the key word here is COMMUNICATION. Understanding of what we do, as teachers, usually builds up over time. I could follow up with examples, but that would make the post too long.

Couldn't agree more John. I was simply pointing out that its not as simple as "dealing with" a parent. In most cases you need their active involvement.

Another fine post..
You keep making the points I want to make!

I have had former students tell me, much later, that my support held them together through times that were nearly impossible for them because communication totally broke down between them and their parents, mostly in their teens.

But it doesn't have to be anything huge. I have parents who think their kids are not practicing, but their work tells me that they are. So I have to explain amount of practice vs. quality of practice. I have other parents who insist that their kids are practicing, and I have to explain that when students make no progress, or lose progress, the WAY they are practicing is destructive. Then I have to explain what we MEAN by practice, that time by itself is nothing. And so on...

So in the matter of music itself, usually parents know their children much less than we do. It is our expert area, and success depends on whether or not these parents are willing to learn from us, in our specialized area.

I'm also a parent. I'm also a grandparent. Anyone my age learned long ago how much he did NOT know about what his children were doing, feeling and thinking. My parents did not know a lot about me until I was grown, and my parents were good parents.

No one knows everything about another human being, and in life we share different aspects of ourselves with different people.

Absolutely, in fact, we usually end up begging for it!

I often read things on this forum with which I disagree, but I rarely disagree with anything as strongly as I disagree with this.

One of the purposes of study -- perhaps the main purpose -- is to be able to draw on the experiences and knowledge of those who went before. In some subjects, these experiences and knowledge go back hundreds of years, and involve thousands of people. No single human being even lives long enough for personal experience to make study redundant. We humans have the capacity for directed and informed empathy -- perhaps we are the only living creatures who do. Taken to its logical conclusion, your argument would mean that a doctor could not advise a cancer patient unless the doctor had suffered from cancer. Or a lawyer could not advise a tenant on a property dispuate unless the laywer had personally had difficulties with landlords.

I'm sure it's perfectly possible for a piano teacher without children to gain some idea of what parenthood is like. We can all speak and read, after all. And I'm sure the converse is true also.

I think the aspect of parenting that people without children cannot experience is the emotional side of parenting. You can read all you want about behavior, personality traits, learning style and child-rearing techniques, but until you've been up all night with a sick child or been the one sitting in the living room waiting for them to get home when they've been out driving for the first time on their own or watch them place the ring on their new spouse's finger, you can't possibly know what that feels like.

I thought I could empathize with these things before I had children, but now that I do, I know it's different.

Reading and study about downhill skiing in the warmth of your living room, for example, and actually strapping on the skis on a bright freezing cold day and zooming downhill, are quite different experiences, IMHO.

Sure, reading about anything can prep you, but the actual doing is another thing entirely, especially with people, where each person/child/student is unique, and how they respond, and how to properly respond to them, must be learned moment by moment.

This is why the police, for example, typically do not send rookies fresh from the academy out by themselves on night patrol in the high-crime areas. Instead, they spend lots of time riding with a more experienced officer to get experience unavailable in the classroom.

I have lots of study regarding parenthood and teaching, some of which was helpful, some not at all, yet most of what I know that actually works with my abilities, I learned by doing.

I think the aspect of parenting that people without children cannot experience is the emotional side of parenting. You can read all you want about behavior, personality traits, learning style and child-rearing techniques, but until you've been up all night with a sick child or been the one sitting in the living room waiting for them to get home when they've been out driving for the first time on their own or watch them place the ring on their new spouse's finger, you can't possibly know what that feels like.

I thought I could empathize with these things before I had children, but now that I do, I know it's different.

Also, regarding parenting- people/kids have FREE WILL. Just because a parent does "THIS" does not mean the kid will do "THAT".
Wish it were that easy!

My friends and I joke around that the best parents are the ones without any children! I was one of those once upon a time ...

It's 6 of one, and half a dozen of the other. Formal study of something gives you organized knowledge that you would not have otherwise and which you can use. Otoh, it represents reality, and reality is always more complex and not as black and white as any formal model of it. This is why a fresh graduate is so cock-sure, but a seasoned professional who is really good at his job may say "I don't know anything - I'm still learning." when what he means is that there is so much more to it. If someone makes such a statement you can bet he knows a heck of a lot.

The trick is balance. You take what you have learned as a guideline, you keep observing and cautiously try and test things, keeping the guidelines in mind but only so far. A body of knowledge can act as blinders and in a sense render people "stupid". Somebody does something that works, and you dismiss it as wrong because it doesn't fit what you studied. It cannot work according to your studies, therefore it does not work, even if it does. The bodies of knowledge are incomplete interpretations of what exists, and it's too easy to forget that. It makes us uncomfortable.

Yes, you can have an idea about teachers, parents, students, and children. Some of your ideas will be interpretations - what you imagine. It cannot be otherwise. You can only have a decent picture if you have actually tasted that person's reality. Can you know what the hour is like from beginning to end for a teacher in a lesson with a student and family with their unique character, and the next hour and the next? Will you imagine their reactions and behavior to be similar to your own? Can a teacher understand the reality of parent and child? What if their circumstance is removed from their own: say a teacher who had lessons since childhood in a middle class home, teaching a child from a single parent family living in poverty? Will stereotypes creep in?

The fact is that we cannot know. That is why it is important to listen, and do have a healthy dose of doubt about anything you assume to know, but still with enough confidence in what you know that you can function in whatever it is you do.

There is a rueful story by James Heriot, the veterinarian whose books brought us the TV series "All Things Bright and Beautiful". This tale involves his reflections when he had practised as a vet for about 10 years, and knew a lot more than he had when he was still in college. Then he thought he knew everything: a decade later he knew he didn't.

His flashback goes to his third year in college, strolling down the street with his head full of everything he had learned. They had been studying horses, horse anatomy, horse everything. He felt very wise and suddenly on the street he saw, tethered to a pole, a horse! He proudly strode up to the horse, ran his expert hands over the animal while his expert eyes noted things from his expert textbook knowledge, feeling every bit the expert. At that moment the horse picked him up by the collar with its teeth, and held him in the air like a naughty puppy. He dangled there looking ridiculous and couldn't do anything about it. At that moment the horse owner came out, gave his horse a curt command, "Drop it!" and the horse let go.

The last words he said to the budding vet was "Dinna mess with things ya know nothing about." This horse owner did not know any of the things the vet had studied for 3 years, but he had worked with horses for maybe 30 years, and knew an awful lot that the vet might never know.

In the time of Heriot, veterinarians were fighting a lot of ignorance and backwardness which crippled or killed animals. The "college learning" gave them tools which were very effective. But at the same time, the old farmers knew a thing or two as well. Dunno - it almost seems pertinent here. The books are full of tales of the relationship between a professional and his clients who did not have his knowledge - so maybe it is relevant.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Funny and very appropriate story and... right from the horse's mouth!