I recently talked to a parent with a ‘strong-willed’ child. She wasn’t sure how long the whole violin journey would last because she wasn’t sure how long her daughter would be interested.

I had a few ideas about the concept of quitting…

1) Bob Duke once shared the insight… your students will either play violin forever, or they will at some point quit. We need to de-stigmatize what it means to quit. It isn’t the end of the world. It isn’t taboo. People quit. In fact, everyone who isn’t playing violin anymore quit playing violin at some point. We would do ourselves a service to build some safe off-ramps for our students to avoid a traumatic end to an otherwise beautiful journey.

2) If two of the three members of the Suzuki triangle want to continue we will continue. Violin lessons are not the singular effort of the child. They are the shared effort of parent, student, and teacher. If two of those members (parent and teacher; teacher and student; student and parent) still feel strongly about continuing, it is the responsibility of those two to keep the momentum of learning moving forward. When it is truly time to find an ‘off-ramp’ it is often a unanimous decision.

3) Don’t quit when it is hard, quit when it is easy. Challenge is part of the process. In fact, challenge might BE the process. If you exit while moving through great difficulty you are quitting difficulty, not the violin. Difficulty will never go away, so it is best not to avoid it. Instead make your decision to quit once you’ve crested challenge and it is truly a decision about the violin and its place in your life.