How Long Should My Child Practise Every Day?

Dear Piano Parents,

Welcome — and if you have been here before, welcome back. I am Dr. XinRu.

This is the question I am asked more than any other. How long should she practise? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? An hour, if we are being serious about it?

I know. Everybody asks it. It is the obvious question, and every method book has an obvious answer printed somewhere near the front.

But it is the wrong question.

It measures the thing that does not matter, and it never once asks about the thing that does. A child can sit at the piano for thirty minutes and finish nothing. A child can sit there for eight and finish exactly what they came to finish.

So stop asking how long. Ask what got finished.

Two things, then — and they come in this order.

1. At the very beginning, forget the clock entirely

If your child is 4 and has just started, do not ask how long.

Ask whether they sat down at all.

Every day. That is the whole instruction. Five minutes. Three minutes, if three minutes is what today had in it. It genuinely does not matter. What matters is that it happened — today, and tomorrow, and the day after that.

Like brushing their teeth. Like eating. Like going to bed. Not a thing they decide to do, a thing that simply happens.

That is the most important thing in this entire letter, so I will say it again in fewer words: at the start, daily beats long. A child who plays for three minutes every day will overtake a child who plays for forty minutes on Sunday, and it will not be close.

(I wrote about the habit in the very first letter, if you want it in full: Starting Piano at Four: Three Things I Wish Every Parent Knew Before Lesson One.)

2. Once it is daily, stop counting minutes and start counting the work

When the habit is actually there — when sitting down is no longer the battle — your child’s practice becomes the same thing an adult’s practice is.

You work backwards from a goal.

Pick a goal for one week. Only one week. Your child is new and you do not yet know how far they can go, so do not plan a term. Plan until the next lesson.

Say the goal is: by the next lesson, I want this piece fluent.

Now count what that actually costs.

The piece has two phrases. A phrase takes maybe thirty to fifty goes before it is fluent — that is my honest number, not a tidy one. So across the week: ten of the first phrase a day, ten of the second.

That is it. That is the whole sum.

And look what you have just done. You have written the homework. You have designed the practice. Nobody has to wonder, at six o’clock on a Tuesday, what we are supposed to be doing at the piano — the answer is ten and ten, and when the ten and ten are done, we are finished for today.

Some days you will have less time. Do less. Some days you will have more. Do more. The clock moves around; the work does not. The work gets finished by the last day, because that is what you set out to do.

And now “how long should she practise” has answered itself. As long as it takes to do ten and ten.

So how fast does this actually go?

Here are my numbers, from my own students. Not from a book.

At five minutes a day — properly, with a task, knowing what the five minutes are for — a beginner takes about a month before the keyboard is really theirs. Then two or three months, sometimes half a year, before they begin to read notes and hold them.

At twenty to thirty minutes a day — again, with a task, knowing what they are practising, not sitting at the piano killing time — the same child gets the keyboard in one to two weeks. Starts reading some basic notes at about a month. Is fluent at it at about two months.

Same child. Same method. The difference is the practice.

So the real answer to “how long” is: how fast do you want to go? Five minutes a day is a perfectly respectable answer. It is a year instead of two months. That is a choice, not a failure — but make it knowingly, and do not then wonder in March why it is slow.

And it depends on your child, too. Some will not follow a homework sheet at all. Some adore it and tick every circle off and ask for more circles. Those are two different children and they need two different weeks. You know which one lives in your house.

One more thing, and then I will stop

You will have noticed that everything above only works if your child knows what they are supposed to be doing when they sit down.

So: every beginner should have a homework sheet, and it should be a daily one. Not a note at the end of the lesson. A sheet, with the week on it, that they can look at without you.

It is the single thing that raises practice efficiency the most, and it is the thing almost nobody does.

That deserves a whole letter of its own, so I will write it next time.

Until then — stop asking me how long.

Ask what got finished today.

Best wishes to your piano journey, wherever you are.

Dr. XinRu

(who is struggling over whether to get a SushiDog now or not 🤔)