Learning to play an instrument is a great way to expose your child to music and its developmental advantages.  Giving your child private music lessons is not the only way, of course.  Curricula that explore the development of cultural movements and ideas, such as Discovering Music, can connect events and solidify an understanding of civilization in a way that private music lessons cannot.  (See two of my previous posts on potholes in history.)  However, in my opinion, any child who can be allowed (or gently coerced) to play an instrument should be taking lessons.

That said, private music lessons are among the most expensive of educational endeavors.  Lessons for multiple children – to say nothing of multiple instruments – easily runs into hundreds of dollars per month, especially for a homeschooling family in which none of those lessons are provided in school.  Three of our children have taken or are taking piano or group music lessons, and two of them have taken both from me and from an outside teacher.  In my next posts, I’ll discuss the advantages of teaching instrument lessons within your own family, some guidelines to set if you choose to try it, and finally the advantages of taking lessons outside the home.

The most obvious advantage of assuming the role of music teacher for your own children is the financial one; teaching your own children costs no money for instruction.  And sometimes financial circumstances are the determining factor in the decision.  I taught our older two children piano for two years each because, at the time, there was absolutely no money for lessons and no option for swapping services (a practice I’ll address in a subsequent post).

A second advantage to combining the music teacher-parent roles is your ability to tailor instruction to your child’s circumstances.  When my second child, a boy, was starting first grade, he expressed quite a bit of interest in taking piano.  He did not, however, have the requisite attention span.  And as I’ve already noted, we did not have the funds.  Thankfully, as his mother and his teacher, I had options.  We did one 10-15-minute lesson every five days or so, as opposed to the traditional thirty-minutes-per-week scenario.  This worked wonderfully for him.  I would likely have been hard-pressed to find someone else willing to arrange this, to say nothing of my own willingness to transport a child to a 10-15-minute piano lesson every five days.  For us, it paid off; he’s still playing.

Flexible scheduling, the absence of transportation issues, and not having to arrange childcare for younger siblings when going to lessons all offer further enticement to teaching within the family.  However, as homeschooling parents are well aware, teaching at home has its pitfalls, and in my next post, I’ll address those.