Teenagers: How to Keep Them Motivated?

[The following article is excerpted from a presentation given at the 2018 IMTEX conference in

Remscheid, Germany. If you would like to listen to the podcast episode, click here.]

Motivating young children can seem simple. Sometimes it is just a matter of smiling a lot, showing enthusiasm, having fun, and turning most activities into a "game." To motivate the older student is different, because the older student looks for other kinds of things than the younger child.

Teenagers have needs like all of us, but what young people once received from their parents when they were young children, teens now need from others, such as: love, support, encouragement, nurturing, acceptance, and attention. Teens no longer need their parents to direct them as much. Instead, teens need helpful attention; they want to work alongside others.

Teachers can play an important role at this stage because teachers are more removed from the teenager's personal life and are more objective. A teacher's success depends on:

• giving encouragement

• guiding the process

• acknowledging and respecting the teen's choices

• allowing the teen to learn from his or her mistakes

• asking questions

• entering into discussions

• experimenting together

The key word in this process is together. The teen has a strong need to work alongside and together with others.

I believe it is possible to begin this process from the very start of lessons. A teacher can create a learning environment to allow opportunities for the teacher and the teen to learn together. Once the teacher establishes this "together" environment, the process can grow and expand as the teen matures.

Situations change as the teen grows older. The teacher will need to engage the teen and encourage him or her to consider more choices. The teacher can offer more in the way of guiding principles, as long as the teacher is receptive to the teen's own discoveries or suggestions of different approaches or execution. Sometimes my teen students come up with ideas of alternate ways to practice, perform, or solve technical problems that I have not discovered. As a teacher, I need to honor and respect that possibility.

Our responsibility as teachers in this process will be to show our teen students these things:

• How to make wise decisions

• What kinds of questions to ask

• What kinds of decisions to make

When working with teens, keep in mind that teens want to claim more space in the world and be bigger in the social arena. They want to be treated as adults. Although teens think that they are ready to take on the world, we adults know in actuality how scary and difficult the world really is. Teens lack the experience that we adults have, although teens think they are ready. We adults recognize in actuality that teens may be ill-prepared for the challenges that they will face when they live in an adult world.

What will be important for a teacher to do during this time is to foster good communication and a strong personal relationship in order to weather any difficult storms later. The teacher needs to be a "safe haven" during any time that the teen struggles to handle life's problems. The teacher needs to offer helpful guidance that will steer the teen back into conversations with the teen's parents. Overall, the teacher must show the teen respect and that the teacher cares.

We teachers have a useful perspective when it comes to working with teens because we do not share the same emotional and family experience. We can therefore offer objective critical and analytical advice to help teens enter into further conversations with the teen's parents.

Along with emotional changes, teens also experience many physical changes as their bodies mature. Many of these changes are chemical and affect the teen's moods and emotions. These chemicals can cause the teen to experience inadequate sleep and become moody. The teen may sulk and engage in other disrespectful behaviors.

There are two ways to handle such unpleasant interactions:

• Direct confrontation: Many parents and other adults engage in this option, but the result is generally that the teen will become more rebellious and uncooperative.

• Engage differently: Parents and adults can interact differently with the teen and do these things:

• listen more actively

• show more respect for the teen's desires and preferences

• share concerns but continue the conversation in a respectful way

When a teenager gets into trouble, it is usually because the teenager did not

have an opportunity to learn how to control that part of the teenager's life.

So how do we help a teen to learn how to control more areas of the teen's life? We can structure things to gradually allow the teen more opportunities to become more independent. Most importantly, we can allow the teen to learn and grow into independence. Rather than giving instructions and commands, we can allow the teen to take on more responsibility and gain more experience, including the experience of analyzing problems, finding solutions, and taking personal responsibility for outcomes and decisions.

What are some examples of areas that we teachers could offer a teen a gradual experience of taking on more personal responsibility? We could put the teen in charge of certain areas of the teen's home practice, such as maintaining the practice handbook records or completing the assigned review program. For many of my older, more tech-savvy students, I have found that scheduling issues related to lessons and makeups are better handled by the students rather than the parents. I also regularly engage my students in discussions about goal setting and supplemental repertoire choices. The teacher can play a big part in offering opportunities for the teen to stretch the teen's independence muscles.

In the beginning of this article, I wrote that teenagers need helpful attention. How can we teachers provide that? We can build a close and cooperative relationship. We can show our teens that we care about them, and that we will respond to their questions and needs. We can enjoy them and be interested in the persons they are and in what they are doing. We can listen to them talk and solicit their ideas and suggestions. Dr. Suzuki asked us to show everyone respect, and I believe the this means to show respect to everyone, even teenagers. We adults are so accustomed to take on the caretaking role so completely with younger children, that sometimes we forget how to loosen the reins and allow our children to mature into the independent adults they need to be to survive in the world. When we show our teenagers respect, we are showing them that they are important people. ("You're not the boss of me").

When things seem difficult with our teens, we can remind ourselves that they will not be teenagers forever. They will grow into different people with different opinions. We can choose to accept who they are in this moment with enthusiasm and without judgment ("Don't judge me").

Teens have special needs. They desire to be distinct individuals ("I'm my own person"). For music teachers, we can easily help teens fulfill this need merely by encouraging the teens' music pursuits, since this subject is distinctly individual. Teens also desire to be treated separately from their parents and their childhood ("I'm not a baby anymore"). A teacher is in a special role in this instance because teachers and other providers of instruction outside of the home stand outside the home and are therefore more closely aligned with the outside world.

We can recognize and encourage the teens' needs to have meaningful relationships with friends, classmates, and others outside of the home. Summer camps, institutes, workshops, conferences, youth orchestras, and school programs and groups are some of the many experiences that will provide teens with the opportunities to make friends and find emotional support outside the home.

Perhaps the most important thing a teacher can do is to serve as a role model for the teen. In this role, teachers help shape students' attitudes toward life and others. Teachers can demonstrate the best ways to handle typical life situations: conflict resolution, positive outlook about life, belief in the potential of life and the future, and positive impact for others. We can model the philosophy that Dr. Suzuki advocated -- that we serve something and someone greater than ourselves. We can role model how to serve our community and the world that we live in.

I sent a survey of questions to several teenager students, and I would like to share the answers from six of them in a future installment of this blog article. So stay tuned!

If you are interested in further discussion about the "overparenting" and "helicopter parents" issues, I have produced several podcast issues on these topics and reviewed the book, How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success by Julie Lythcott-Haims (click here for the book).

How to Raise an Adult (Avoid Overparenting, part 1) (podcast episode)

What is Our Messge (How to Raise an Adult, part 2) (podcast episode)

Life Skills for Children (Avoid Overparenting, part 3) (podcast episode)

Teach Them to Think (Avoid Overparenting, part 4) (podcast episode)

Until next time,

Happy Practicing!

----- Paula -----

© 2019 by Paula E. Bird

Breaking Up: How to Sever the Suzuki Triangle in a Positive Way

Never is there a good time for a teacher-student relationship to end. Let us discuss this important issue and identify ways to minimize the emotional damage for the parent, the student, and especially the teacher. In my experience the parent is usually the quickest to end the teaching-learning relationship, and sometimes a parent is unaware of the teacher's emotional connection. Teachers often hang onto a teaching relationship longer than perhaps they should because of the tremendous amount of emotional investment the teacher has made.

The teacher's relationship with a student is a very personal one. In order to effective and influential, the teacher must give something of him- or herself. A good teacher does not just give instructions, advice, and directions. A good teacher addresses the whole personality of the student and mentally prepares a program that will encourage, strengthen, and nurture the student to reach his or her greatest potential. Although some teachers may fall short of this mark or may not be the best fit in a particular teaching situation, I believe that most teachers would agree with me about this purpose of good teachers.

How does one break up this teacher-student relationship and in many cases the teacher-parent relationship in a positive way that does not wreak emotional harm and damage? Is there a good way to end a relationship of this type?

Three persons share a part of the Suzuki teaching relationship, so we should consider all of these several perspectives. The typical teaching-learning relationship will include the teacher, the student, and the parent. In the Suzuki world this is referred to as the Suzuki Triangle. Each point of the triangle is important to the growth and potential of the learning situation. If one person along the point of the triangle is not doing his or her job, the shape of the triangle will be altered in a way that may be detrimental to the student's continued learning success. The most optimum teaching-learning environment is one in which each point of the triangle is at its strongest.

Each part of the triangle is important:

• The teacher's responsibility is to teach the parent how to be an effective teacher or coach on the home front during the student's home practices. The teacher also teaches the student all the technical aspects of making a good sound on the instrument and of effectively expressing a musical idea or emotion. The teacher has typically attended many institutions of higher learning and taken many different levels of teacher training in order to be effective in this aspect of teaching.

• The parent's responsibility is to teach the child at home in the teacher's stead. The parent is responsible for playing the listening assignments and for practicing the assigned homework material. In addition, the parent assists the child in learning a new piece (fingerings and bowing) and in practicing effectively.

• The child's responsibility is to simply be a child. We allow the child to attend to his or her learning through the child's senses, at the child's optimum pace, within the framework of the child's ability to concentrate, and helping the child achieve skill development through effective review and repetition as the child focuses on one thing at a time.

At some point in the process, the distinctions between the various triangle roles disappear and the parties take on added or different roles. The teacher strives to guide the student to be his or her teacher in many respects as the student attains the advanced stages of musical development. The parent fulfills the role of a coach and fan and functions more in the realm of waving flags and shouting hoorays from the balcony. And the student assumes more and more responsibility to make and implement his or her own decisions about expressing musical ideas and what technical means to use to accomplish the best expression of those musical ideas.

All of my discussion to this point is to help others understand how involved everyone becomes in the process. The longer the relationship has gone on, the deeper the relationships and emotional connections. When a parent, teacher, or student makes the decision to break the connection, there will be emotional upheaval and hurt, and sometimes anger as a way to express the hurt. In many situations, the teacher will emotionally grieve the loss of the relationship, and the student will feel abandoned, even if the teacher is not the reason for the breakup. The student will be watching the adults and how they handle the situation, so be aware of the role you choose to play in the scenario. Remember, as teachers and parents, we are always role modeling for the child how the child should behave as an adult. Please be responsible in your behavior and show the child what is the mature way to handle this type of situation.

There are a few possible ways to handle the difficult conversation about the future of this relationship, whether it is by email, phone call, or a personal face-to-face meeting. Whichever method you choose, find a way to do it without having the students be involved. Perhaps you have observed a change in the situation or the other person's behavior. Focus your attention on the other person as a friend, and express your concern and care about the other person. 

Ask if there is anything that you can do to help the other person. Keep the conversation in a positive place. If it comes to that, you could gently explore the idea of whether another teacher would be a better fit for the current situation.

Perhaps the situation will dissolve into tears. Tears are a sign of healing and are a healthy way to share a compassionate moment with each other. Perhaps the conversation will explode into anger. Keep calm and reassured that the anger belongs to the other person. Continue to speak positively and express your concern and desire to help.

My rule of thumb is that these difficult conversations are better to held in the open than to allow them to lie silent and fester emotionally. 

Here are some more suggestions for ending the relationship in a positive way:

Acknowledge the past history in a positive way.  Avoid complaining. Avoid blaming. Avoid any negativity. Recount the history of your relationship together with gratitude and joy. Criticism and judgments offer no positive benefit to either person. Remember that your child is watching how you handle this situation, so be sure that your behavior and message is the one you want your child to learn from observing you.

Avoid blaming the other person for your decision. Avoid accusing the teacher of falling short in some way. Stay focused and positive. Being negative or making nasty remarks do not accomplish anything positive. Keep in mind as a parent, that most new teachers will call the previous teacher to get the "whole story." If there was a nasty breakup, the former teacher may find it difficult to cast the historical information in a positive light. So, take personal responsibility for your choice and state your reasons in a positive, logical (unemotional), and non accusatory way. As a teacher, I spend several months and several conversations or emails trying to fortify the relationship and bring everyone back to the same positive teaching-learning environment. 

Avoid complaining. Stay upbeat. Do not use the breakup as an opportunity to air your stored grievances. Expressing your complaints now will not change anything or improve the future situation. Remember that your child watches to see how you handle this situation, so act well. Do not pull out all the "kitchen-sink" grievances, which would be a poor demonstration to your child or student of how to handle conflict.

Allow the other person to "save face." The other person may become upset, but nothing useful will come from an argument. Since it takes two people to make an argument successful, take the higher road and refuse to argue. Just accept the other person's anger and agree with them. The argument will eventually fizzle.

Apologies are worth extra points. If you can find it in your heart to do this, you can walk away from the situation with a well deserved pat on the back. Accept responsibility for the problem and sprinkle your apologies liberally throughout the conversation. Borrowing the philosophy of the famous cinema star Clark Gable, apologize for your shortcomings.

Thank the other person for the experience that you had with them. Whether you deem the relationship to be worthy of continuing or not, the fact of the matter is that the teacher did invest his or time in the teaching-learning relationship and deserves to be thanked for the time and effort that he or she put forth. The parent was involved in the lesson process and made contributions in terms of driving, practicing, and finance that are worth acknowledging.

Next time, do your homework. Choosing a teacher should not be a quick decision. A parent should speak to the teacher, ask the teaching community for recommendations about the teacher, observe the teacher in the teaching-learning environment, and provide the child with an opportunity to interact with the teacher before entering into the new relationship. Teachers do much more than provide "babysitting" services. Many teachers view their profession as a calling on a grand scale that will have a positive, changing, and lasting impact on the global community. Teachers spend a great deal of time honing their teaching skills in order to provide the greatest service to their students and their parents and families. Do your homework and find one of these teachers.

Whatever you do, do it with class. I got this advice when I was a youngster about to quit my first major job in a fit of anger. I heard this advice two hours before I was about to stage a royal blowup. I considered the wisdom of the advice and instead completely reconstructed my resignation plan. I followed all the steps I outlined above. I acknowledged all the persons in the organization by name and listed their contributions to my personal growth in the workplace. I thanked everyone for all that they did to help me on the job or in my growth. I stayed positive and avoided complaining. I did not work up a frothy blame game but instead focused on what I had learned and what value I would take from my work experience and put into my future endeavors. I chose my positive and grateful attitude and expressed it liberally and in a public manner via a memo addressed to all the partner-directors of the organization.

Let me tell you the benefits I received from taking this "high road" of ending the relationship. My employers and fellow workers made their good-byes with big smiles on their faces (and tears in their eyes in a few cases). I got big bear hugs from some of the top dogs. I got acknowledgment in return for all that I had contributed to the firm. The firm actually sent me a sizable amount of outsource work in the month that followed, which really helped me out financially. And because I showed that I had class, I was included in their recommendations to others.

Most of all, I felt good about what I had done and the way I had handled it. I felt like a grownup.

Please show consideration and thoughtful reflection in your relationships, whether it is with your students, your children, the studio parents, or the teacher. Please show some class and professionalism in the manner in which you end a teaching-learning relationship.

The Teach Suzuki Podcast broadcast a more in depth discussion of this topic in episode 100. You can listen to that episode here.

Until next time,

Happy Practicing!

----- Paula -----

© 2018 by Paula E. Bird

The Importance of Music Education

Music Teaches Eight Abilities

In a recent podcast episode (episode 52: Why Study Music?), I discussed eight abilities that the study of music will develop. Let me list those eight abilities here:

• Ability to Listen
• Ability to Observe and Imitate
• Ability to Memorize
• Ability to Concentrate
• Ability to Perform
• Ability to be Disciplined
• Ability to Persevere
• Abilities of the Heart

My purpose in bringing up this discussion of the importance of music education is to remind us of Dr. Suzuki's greater mission. He did not merely teach the violin; his greater purpose was to teach the child to be a fine human being with a noble heart. He chose to do that through the study of the violin.

The episode takes a closer look at each of these abilities and why learning them is important for children (and adults). I like to think of these abilities as life skills to be applied in other areas of life. Not only do I believe that children should be taught these life skills, but I think that adults should improve these skill abilities (or learn them) as well. So let us look more closely at each of these eight abilities.

The first ability is the ability to listen. In the Suzuki program, children listen to the songs that they will learn. These children develop a very high level of listening ability and can figure out fingerings and bowings to songs that they have not yet learned except through hearing the songs. This ability to listen to such a high degree will carry over into other important areas of life, such as school, work, or ultimately in a loving relationship with another.

As these children continue lessons into the more advanced books of repertoire, they will also learn how to listen very carefully to their performance. This is a much more complex level of focused listening that expands a child’s ability to hear, listen, and evaluate. If students are not naturally aural learners, they can still develop the ability to listen to a very high degree.

Children also develop the ability to observe and imitate. Dr. Suzuki observed that children already use this ability when they learn to speak their native language. We were blessed with eyes and ears -- two of each -- and that is the best way we have to learn anything. I can make my teaching points clear to my students and their parents when I pick up my instrument and demonstrate the point.

The author John Holt wrote, “How Children Learn” (affiliate link). He describes how a young child learns by imitating: a very young child may attempt to imitate what they see someone else do, and then will stop and watch again to see whether their attempt at imitating measures up to what they saw. They watch, try it out, then watch to see how close they came, make adjustments, try it out again, then watch to see how close they came, make more adjustments, and so forth. In other words, the little ones learned how to do something by watching, imitating, and then trying it out.

An older child, in contrast, would watch, but the imitation might happen a few times in the older child’s mind or imagination first until the older child felt more comfortable and confident that the older child would be able to successfully recreate what the child observed. The podcast episode discusses even more points related to a child's imitation and learning, including the instinct of workmanship (listen).

Another ability developed through the study of music is the ability to memorize. In the Suzuki program, students memorize at first through listening to the pieces they are studying and in the same way that the students learned their native language through hearing and absorbing the language in the environment. In the Suzuki world, students hear the songs that they are studying because parents have the music playing in the home, and the students are constantly exposed to the sounds that the students will be making on the instrument. Later when students learn how to read the language of music, students will learn how to memorize using the sense of sight as well.

The ability to concentrate is a fourth ability developed in music study. I have published a book about the steps that lead to the Twinkle Variations for violin (The Twinkle Project), and I spend a great deal of the early book talking about how to develop concentration and focus in young children and beginning students. This skill development is not just limited to little children though; I spend a great deal of time working on this ability with my older university and adult students as well. It is important that we learn how to focus and concentrate at any stage of our development and life, because without focus and concentration, we do poor or shoddy work. We lose track of important details. We practice poorly, meaning that we learn how to do things inefficiently, with poor quality, and we are not fully engaged in what we are doing.

I remember standing in a line to get on an amusement park ride when I overheard two mothers talking about their 9 and 10 year old boys. The one mother said that she wanted to put her boy in trumpet lessons, but her boy did not concentrate very well. This mother thought that waiting awhile would be the solution. As any Suzuki music teacher would know, waiting will not fix the concentration and focus problem. The only way to learn how to concentrate and focus is to practice doing so. This is a regular part of lessons in my studio, and I ask that the parents of my students spend adequate time on this area as well at home.

The fifth ability is the ability to perform. This ability will apply to all areas of a student’s life. By learning how to perform, students learn how to present themselves and their ideas and work product to share with others. Music has the unique distinction as well of helping us to learn how to make connections with others. Music does not merely entertain by performing for spectators, as occurs in sports. Music adds that other dimension of establishing a communication and a connection with the listener. Since music is energy expressed mostly through sound but also through sight and feeling, it touches listeners on a physical level that sometimes listeners are not even aware is happening. Whenever I do leadership and energy development skill exercises in my group classes, there may be a few students and parents who will be surprised to discover how much connection there can be during a performance. And I mean this in a good way.

There are many performances that may be wonderful but that do not touch us to the core. Recently one of my high school advanced students attended a symphony concert where the performer played a concerto that my student was currently studying. At first my student loved the performance and raved about the many things that he heard during the concert. When I saw my student at his next lesson, he had some additional observations to make, such as that he did not feel that connection that we talk about. The performance was indeed great, but it was not that soul-touching, mind blowing experience that we will remember forever.

The ability to perform teaches us how to develop self confidence, how to present ourselves in a way that provides us with a sense of inner strength as well as projects that core strength to our audience. And performing also applies to other subjects and areas as well, from sports events and school presentations, to formal situations such as workplace demonstrations. Even being the new kid in the school will involve performance of some kind on the part of all students.

At the university, my violin studio holds a weekly seminar class where we meet to discuss pedagogy and technique development. We also perform for each other. My students learn the crucial performance skills, such as the importance of posture and how one walks onto a stage or into a room and the kind of effect this will have on the audience as well as the performer. We talk about our presentation physically as well as how to use our energy in the creation of the musical performance, and I know that these discussions about performance carry over into other areas of my students’ lives. This is a really, really important skill that is developed by music study.

The ability to be disciplined is one of the most important skills developed through the study of music. Music teaches students how to develop discipline in their personal habits as well as professional ones. Students learn how to practice correctly, how to maintain regular practice routines, how to prepare presentations, how to analyze things and go through a sequence of steps in order to learn and master a new piece of music, a new skill, or a refinement of an old piece or skill.

We learn how to be disciplined to some degree, usually with something that we like to do. Then we might move on to another activity and work on the discipline ability with the new activity. I find that following a marathon training program has quite nicely dovetailed with my ability to be disciplined about my music practices as well. I learned at a very young age how to be disciplined in my music, and I find that this ability has carried forward into many activities, from writing legal briefs that were 50 pages in length to running a 50K. Both of these activities took the same concentration, focus, and discipline that my music practices demanded from me.

The ability to persevere is the ability that will carry us through tough situations and keep us from giving up when things become hard. Life may be full of tragic, heart-wrenching, and mind-blowing events that will be difficult to overcome. Yet, many people do. The ability to persevere helps to give people the ability to work through tough times. 

The study of music teaches us how to develop that skill. We encounter stumbling blocks pretty much all the time. But for the love of the music, the fun of doing what we are doing, that fact that our parents seem to want us to do this and enjoy the activity and encourage us, and the fact that children generally want to please their parents, parents can really teach a child this important ability. With a little humor, lots of patience and kindness, and a generous dose of good will and encouragement, parents can help children work through any frustration or difficulty and come out the other side with a smile and a sense of pride that the child accomplished something. Dr. Suzuki said, “Teaching intonation and technique will never be more than a method. We do not have to become professional musicians. It is enough to grow up playing the violin. Because a person works at playing the violin well he develops ability to overcome any difficult problems by working. Then he accomplishes the ability to overcome even the hardest problems easily.”

And finally, the last ability of music education that I want to discuss is what Jeanne Luedke calls the abilities of the heart. Consider the possibilities of this quote from Dr. Suzuki: “Music exists for the purpose of growing an admirable heart. A child raised on Bach from a young age will develop the noble soul, powerful personality and the religious sensitivity of Bach. The force that makes a child want to live and survive will absorb the traits of Bach’s music to a high degree.”

Even young children can play a musical instrument and create a musical mood that will touch the heart of a listener. Music has that power, and even the youngest of children can learn how to express that power and share it with others, even very young children.

I tell my new studio parents that when children study music and how to play a musical instrument that these children will be exposed to the best of music that our culture has to offer. Music has been around since the beginning of recorded time, and what has survived over the centuries in this body of musical works is the best of these works. The child will absorb so many things while studying this music and how to play. The child will not only absorb the sounds of music, but also the expression of feelings and events and emotions and even the description of beautiful things in nature, including possibly the recreation of story within the musical notes – all of this will be absorbed by the child who is exposed to and studies this music and combination of sounds.

The child's parents and other family members will also absorb this same fabulous collection of the best of our culture. We also learn how to appreciate and study new ideas and sounds, including new music and music from different cultures besides the Western culture. Music gives our young students and children the tools necessary to learn about, connect with, and appreciate the creations of other cultures besides our own.

At some point in their music studies, my students ask me what book I’m in. I always answer the same way. I am in book 11. And this book is the hugest book of all the Suzuki books, because it is everything else that is not yet in books 1-10. This book has thousands of pieces in it.

The gift of the abilities of the heart is my favorite gift from the study of music, because I think that this was Dr. Suzuki’s most important mission in his teaching. Let us recommit to this mission in all that we do with our children and students.

To hear more about these eight abilities, visit the podcast: episode 52: Why Study Music?

To learn more about my book, The Twinkle Project, visit: my shop.

Happy Practicing!

----- Paula -----

 © 2017 by Paula E. Bird

If you found this episode (or any episode) of the podcast helpful, and you would like to make a donation to support the Teach Suzuki Podcast and the blog, click here. My efforts to write and produce the Teach Suzuki blog and podcast do not generate income except through the generosity of those readers and listeners. I really appreciate your support. Just click here for a direct link to PayPal to support the blog and podcast.

What's Love Got to Do With It?

Recently I broadcast a podcast episode that began a short series about the importance of love in the parent-child relationship. This love topic applies to more than just a parent and child; it also applies to a teaching relationship as well. In this episode I again stressed the importance of why parents are important in a child's life and I expanded my ideas. Here are the basic points about love that I made:

1. Children want to please their parents, so parents have a great deal of power when it comes to influence and role modeling.
2. Parents are with their children more time than anyone else. Again, parents have a great deal of power to influence because of the hours spent with the children.
3. Parents care how well their children do or develop more than anyone else.
4. Parental love is the first love a child experiences and this experience affects how the chid will develop a relationship with the world and others later in life.
5. Love expands. It never contracts or constricts.
6. Love is a verb. It is something we do, not something we have or hold.

I also discussed the importance of building an interdependent relationship between the parent and the child rather than push the child toward independence too soon or before the child is ready.

I continued the discussion by setting out a few things that parents might do to establish and strengthen the parent-child bond of interconnectedness and interdependence. I also related Dr. Suzuki's admonition that children will treat their elderly parents as the children witness how the parents treat their neighbors and others now.

I finished up the current episode by discussing unconditional love. How does one define this ultimate expression of love? Here is St. Paul's definition of love, written to the Corinthians over two centuries ago:

Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn't want what it doesn't have. Love doesn't strut, Doesn't have a swelled head, Doesn't force itself on others, Isn't always "me first, "Doesn't fly off the handle, Doesn't keep score of the sins of others, Doesn't revel when others grovel, Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, Puts up with anything, Trusts God always, Always looks for the best, Never looks back, But keeps going to the end.

(The Message by Eugene H. Peterson, affiliate link) 

Dr. Suzuki was once asked, "Why do you teach?" His answer was:

"First for the love of the child; second, for the love of teaching the child; and third for the love of the music that is taught the child, but the child always comes first."

You may listen to the podcast episode on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher Radio, or you may click the link here: Click here. The subsequent episode that completes this mini series discussion can be found here.

Happy Practicing!

----- Paula -----

 © 2017 by Paula E. Bird

If you found this episode (or any episode) of the podcast helpful, and you would like to make a donation to support the Teach Suzuki Podcast and the blog, click here. My efforts to write and produce the Teach Suzuki blog and podcast do not generate income except through the generosity of those readers and listeners. I really appreciate your support. Just click here for a direct link to PayPal to support the blog and podcast.