Originally Posted by kaibab
I think one reason for this disagreement comes from thinking that kids complaining about a piano practice are necessarily doing something they hate.
Quite. It sounds as though the OP's child would actually prefer to give up and that makes it to me an extreme case where I wouldn't want to go. But my DS7 sometimes cries over his piano practice and I sit there and make him do it. If I ask him whether he'd rather give up piano, his answer is always an emphatic No. He understands that a condition of continuing to have lessons is that he practise daily and properly. If he complained daily, I'd probably take the choice out of his hands and stop arranging lessons for him. But as long as he consistently says he wants to continue, and only sometimes complains about practice, I see helping him through that intermittent reluctance as just part of parenting, and something that's useful when I need something to remind him that hard work isn't always fun but does pay off.

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