Belle and ABQMom,

I appreciate your insights.

My goal is to allow him to be challenged and to internalize the cause and effect relationship between effort and results so that when he does find his own passions he will be able to pursue them in a manner that will allow him to excel. As I mentioned, I am not a musician and have no dreams of him being one.

He's not forced to compete. He's not forced to be on a team. He only performs 1-3 times/year and exhibits no anxiety over it. I understand that you both have very negative memories of being forced to do something you don't like and I guess I have trouble understanding the why? of that. I mean, I can understand it in a situation where a child's life revolves around the parents goals of musical/athletic achievement. But that's not the case here. Again, we are talking 3.5 hours/week. Total. It seems to me that if someone really "hates" that, then it's not really about the task at hand. There's something else going on. I'd like to try and identify that and change it, if I can. And even if I can't change it and he does end up quitting piano in the near future, I'd like to avoid repeating the pattern in the future.

Regardless of the time commitment, I don't think he finds piano innately unpleasant. Both he and his brother were working on Solfeggietto and I stopped it with him because he just would not slow down to learn it properly and he needed to work on other pieces. In restrospect, this was probably a mistake. But he still likes to play the first two lines. He enjoys listening to Pachelbel's Canon in D and I asked him if he would like to learn it and he responded positively. He only complains about the piano when he is asked to play - he doesn't bring it up at other times. I am not ready to consider this a lost cause...yet. I would first like to give it one more go and identify where we went wrong.