Did my kids get cut from Team Piano?

And other thoughts about the ramping up of youth activities.

Last week, we received an email (addressed to all parents with kids taking lessons) from our kids’ piano teacher in which she explained that she was moving to a tiered model for lessons: one tier for kids who meet practice requirements and another (more expensive) tier for those that don’t. 

The gist was this: 

We had just been (soft) cut from Team Piano. 

Team Piano had decided that it was not for kids who were simply interested in piano.

Team Piano was not an activity, but THE activity. 

Team Piano was now an elite studio, and we were told that our kids were not elite (which is so obvious that it makes me laugh to even type it out). 

So, our kids were encouraged to find another place to learn…or quit…whatever. 

Our commitment to Sparkle Motion had been questioned.

If you’re curious: 

• Tier 1 (which I’ll call the “Competitive Track”) was $32 for one thirty minute lesson per week. It required each student to practice thirty minutes a day, five days a week (amounting to about five hours for our two kids per week total).  It asked parents to consider appropriate “consequences” for the kid if they did not meet this requirement, though she did not suggest what those should be (which kinda made it more ominous, no?)

• Tier 2 (which I’ll call the “Casual Track”) was a whopping $45 for one thirty minute lesson per week. Since two kids were taking lessons from her, this option would have meant a $90/ week commitment (meaning approximately $360 most months) and would have constituted a 66% increase in the cost since last year. 

We were shocked at the price increase, but we were surprised to see the piano teacher request such a specific time commitment: especially at the beginning of a school year. 

And look, here are a couple of things you should know about us. 

1. My wife and I were both band kids. We understand that learning an instrument takes practice. 

2. My kids asked to do piano. It wasn’t an activity I was making them do. They practiced as much or as consistently as most kids do (at least kids who aren’t this guy). 

3. Piano is not my kids’ only activity. They’re both really involved. Piano was always going to be one of their interests, but not THE interest.

We exchanged the typical emails, but the end result was that we had to politely walk away from future lessons. And that sucks, right? It was something they enjoyed and something I thought they had benefited from (especially my daughter, who starts band this month in middle school). 

The simple fact was that Team Piano needed a higher level of commitment OR just more cold, hard cash.  And that’s where it all felt very, very familiar to me. 

That is exactly what has happened in the Youth Sports Thing. We have seen it happen over and over again. Teams start out simple and unassuming, usually as whatever the coach can assemble, and then (usually after a lot of losing), they decide that they want to skill up; they want to become elite. And that almost always means that they have to get rid of their current players, and find new ones.  I could write an entire Substack about the troubling psychology that fuels youth sports, but suffice it to say that the results have been pretty clear. Most kids stop playing organized sports at age twelve. Full stop. 

They just quit. Which, when you think about it, is amazingly sad and pretty boss of the kids. They just say, “Screw this. I’m out of here.” This great piece by Peter Grey has so many wonderful insights about why this is a healthy response to injustice and unfairness in their activities.

So, this is all to say that we know what will happen when you ramp up a youth activity. Some will stick with it despite how miserable or stressful adults make it. The rest find something else. Unfortunately, a lot of research lately suggests that these kids aren’t finding something else and that they’re miserable because of it (and many other factors coalescing). 

This is super dumb for many reasons. I’ve stopped trying to tell people this in the Youth Sports world, but here it is: the really talented people in the world (in any activity) aren’t the ones who beat the thing to death. They are the ones who loved it. 

I’ve often said that my son loves baseball in spite of organized baseball. I think that’s a helpful place to start. Instead of thinking about how we can professionalize their activity, how can we help them love it? 

We saw something like this play out on Team Piano. Not only can I tell you when Ben became interested in piano, I can tell you one of the songs that started him thinking about wanting to learn it. He and I were listening to Logic’s “Wake Up.” Now, it might not be the song that would’ve inspired you to take piano, but for Ben it seemed like it opened him up to the possibility that he could make music he would want to listen to. 

But, of course, something very predictable happened:

He started piano and dutifully practiced his exercises from the piano book she gave him. He progressed quickly because he understood the idea that this might translate eventually into music he wanted to hear and play. He’s a band kid, after all.  By the end of the semester, he was playing precious little duets with his middle-aged teacher. Somewhere in there, he had decided on his own that he wanted to play the theme to the film, Rudy.  So, in an amazing display of initiative, he asked the music store to check their database for the sheet music, purchased it, and tried learning it. He told his teacher about this, but sadly, she didn’t seem to care. Then, during the spring, he started telling me that she seemed upset with him at practice. She didn’t think he was practicing. 

He was, but again: this wasn’t his main activity. So, yes, it had to fit in between Boy Scouts, middle school band, after school activities, and sports. 

That’s not the point, though. The point is that he rightly perceived that he wasn’t meeting her expectations and it caused him to worry. It started being a chore, and then his interest cratered, gratefully, about the same time we paused for the summer.

Meanwhile, instead of meeting with us (or other parents of kids she wanted to motivate) to share her frustrations, the teacher concocted an incentive system to reward or punish (them or us…I’m not sure) her way to a more prestigious studio. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton, and at least one friend said the whole thing reminded him of the famous/infamous Kahneman & Tversky experiment. Another put it more succinctly: “$90/ hour! GTFO!”

If you’re still reading this, God bless you because I know it’s more than you ever wanted to know about the state of youth piano instruction.  And yes, it's more than I ever wanted to know or think about piano. Isn’t that kind of the point? Why isn’t this easier? Why can’t a kid just take piano? Why can’t they just try archery or golf or debate or crochet? Why does it have to be Elite Debate or Competitive Crochet? Why do they have to be future Mozarts or whoever archery’s Mozart is? 

We were in an outdoor outfitter store recently trying to figure out how to spend a gift card my brother’s family had given us last Christmas, and mostly gawking at the ridiculous prices associated with the gear. 

“Why is it like this?” I asked.

“Because the whole place, like the whole town” my wife replied, “is designed to help you identify the activity that is your thing.” 

“And then they squeeze the money out of you,” she said. 

I took a minute to think. 

“But,” I asked, “what if your thing is just raising your kids?”