I was forced to play piano for 10 years and to do all those recitals and music theory tests. I could never wiggle myself out of it because of all the guilt-tripping. So of course, I went to college and promptly dropped all of it.
And unexpectedly, nearly a decade later, this pandemic thing happened, I returned to piano, recently bought a digital piano, and found a teacher. I practice 1-2 hours every day. And a lot of those skills I thought I would have lost returned pretty quickly.
I have a lot of complicated emotions around this that I haven’t really quite figured out. But if I were to summarize them at their current stage, they’d be something like: (1) I am grateful that I was pushed to learn this instrument, (2) I realized I really disliked my childhood piano teacher, (3) my parents failed to recognize that for 10 years (as evidenced by never presenting the option of finding someone else), and (4) playing to inflate someone else’s ego is absolutely demotivating.
One of the unfortunate effects is that roughly 1/3rd of Mozart’s sonatas are unplayable because I have some bad memories associated with them. Fortunately, there’s plenty of music in the world that don’t trigger those feelings, and I am so glad that I didn’t play that much Chopin back then.
Maybe that might help? I’m not a parent, so consider these raw ideas that need some work to become parenting advice.