DS has been playing Suzuki violin since 5 and it has worked well for him. He plays well by ear, but has excellent reading skills as well. He plays cello (not Suzuki) in the school orchestra and is the best reader in the class. Each year, the Suzuki teacher spends more time on reading. The philosophy is that learning music is like learning a language. You learn to speak based on hearing and interacting. We don't wait to teach English until our kids can read! Once they have basic listening and speaking skills, then you can add the reading.
We deal with the listening by putting the CD in the player at bedtime. We have it playing while we chat and get him tucked in. That is all we do and it is really easy. Now that he is older, we have also put the songs on his MP3 so when he listens on shuffle, he'll get a few songs snuck in.
Regarding hours of practice a day, we have never bought into that either. His teacher just told us to have him work on one or two things each day. Often that has only been 10 or 15 minutes. They key is not the length of the practice but that he does it every day. Sure, we still fight about it and it sometimes got ugly, but we would never have gotten through if we insisted on a half hour or more a day.
