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Here’s a brief update, in case anyone is curious what’s happening in the SuzukiDad household. We let M quit playing the guitar about a year ago. We had plenty of misgivings, but we couldn’t handle the amount of conflict it generated.

We continued to have a lot of conflict over everyday life, though—truly unpleasant, scary levels of conflict, with M regularly throwing things, hitting us, and destroying things. We felt stuck. We read more parenting books and decided to seek professional help. But we weren’t sure exactly what kind of help to get.

Then we stumbled across a book by Howard Glasser called Transforming the Difficult Child: The Nurtured Heart Approach. And it has been a revelation. Almost immediately when we started adopting some techniques from the book—giving no energy to negative behavior, and describing objectively whatever we saw that was going right in a particular moment—M’s behavior, and our relationship with M, was transformed. Through Glasser’s website, we located a parent coach who had been trained in the approach, and we hired her for consultation and coaching. The results were fantastic.

M is still a high-energy, high-spirited kid, but I feel—really for the first time—that we have found a way to interact with her that really works.

Admittedly, we’ve lowered our expectations. As far as music goes, she is now playing the electric bass (a Kala Ubass), and she has to practice with me for only 15 minutes a day. But she does it, and lately she does it with virtually no conflict.

I wish I had known about the Nurtured Heart Approach years ago. It lines up perfectly with the Suzuki philosophy, and if I had followed the approach when we were practicing Suzuki guitar together, perhaps she’d still be playing today. I still hold out hope that she’ll start back up on the guitar at some point, but it’s a very slim hope.

But regrets don’t get you anywhere. And a core element of the Nurtured Heart Approach is to focus on what’s going right in the present moment, not what’s gone wrong in the past or might go wrong in the future. And in most of our present moments today, things are going pretty right—certainly a lot righter than in the past. If anyone’s out there: check out the Nurtured Heart Approach. It could make a difference in your life.

A very kind commenter asked where I’ve been and said nice things about the blog, so I at least wanted to post a short explanation.

Readers know that my daughter and I really struggled with practice. As it turns out, those struggles defeated me (at least for the moment), and we stopped doing Suzuki guitar at the end of the spring semester.

I am sad about this; sometimes, unspeakably so. I feel like I did so many things wrong. I also still find it hard to fathom; M was in Book 3 and her playing sounded great. It’s hard for me to get my head around the fact that I couldn’t keep her going. Also, I worry about discouraging my handful of readers. I do believe, despite my experience so far, that the Suzuki experience is incredibly powerful and valuable, even with the struggle it entails. But even saying that, I feel like a bit of a fraud—after all, I couldn’t make it work, so who am I to talk?

I appreciate my readers, and I wish you the best. I will try to post some more as I get my thoughts together and have something helpful to say.

I posted instructions about how to modify a $70 SKB Baby Taylor case to fit a fractional guitar. Check it out!

I updated the children’s guitar page to reflect two new recommended guitars:

1. The 48-cm Hopf-Hellweg Bronco from Thomann.de, which I bought this March.
2. The 52-cm Aranjuez from leihinstrumente.de, which a commenter bought recently and recommends.

A parent admired my daughter’s stool at this weekend’s Suzuki Association of Minnesota graduation event, so I’ve updated my gear page by adding more info about chairs and stools. I also added some more info about tuners. Check it out!

(And yes, I know the blog has seemed moribund. But do not despair! I plan to return to regular posting soon.)

I updated my page about children’s guitars. Mostly, I added various additional models of guitars from German sellers. There’s a good chance I’ll take a chance on a 48-cm Hopf-Hellweg Bronco this spring.

Last week, we got a little bogged down in Perpetual Motion. It’s the piece M will be playing for the statewide Suzuki graduation in March, so I asked her to play it on Tuesday or Wednesday. To my surprise, the form was incredibly unreliable: M would skip entire sections.

I thought we were mostly past this stage, because she’s been getting the form of her newer songs down with almost no difficulty (i.e., A Toye, Suzuki’s Allegro). So I was having flashbacks in our home practices last week.

I tried a few things to help M listen to herself better. First, I had her just sing the song. She was pretty reliable. Then, I had her play along with the CD (you have to tune your guitar a fraction of a semitone sharp to match the CD’s pitch). This was a challenge, because the CD is really fast, and she got frustrated with it. I also had her play with the metronome at a pretty good clip, because when she plays slowly, she just lets her mind wander. This all helped some, but didn’t make things entirely reliable. In particular, even if she remembered the form, she often left out any dynamic contrast in the first 4 and last 4 bars.

I do think an analogy helped. At the end of one practice, I asked her, “What’s 4+4?” “Eight,” she replied. “Yes,” I said, “and you never get that wrong, do you? You never answer ‘seven’ or ‘nine,’ because you know it. What’s 4+4?” “Eight.” “Yes. You always get it right, because you know it. And that’s what the form of Perpetual Motion should be like. When you play it, you should always get it right. It’s like knowing 4+4. That’s how you should know the form of this song.”

I’ve since used this analogy again, and I think it helps. As shorthand, I can just say, “You know the form. It’s like knowing 4+4.”

Now, when she played it at her private lesson on Saturday, it still had some problems. Notably, her right hand — which has been getting so much steadier — reverted to old, grabby habits, and she still didn’t add any dynamic contrast to the opening and closing bars (what we call the A1-A2 sections). But she did get the form right, and she got it right again today. So that’s progress.

Apart from the lice, two other things have been interfering with my blogging: (1) my stupid computer, and (2) my backlog of audio and video. The computer is now mostly working, and I’m slogging through the backlog.

Things have been going remarkably well lately. We started working on Carcassi’s Andante two weeks ago, beginning with the first phrase (about 2 bars). Today, we started working on the next phrase. My main focus has been M’s right-hand technique. I’ve done three things that, together, have really succeeded in getting M to focus on her right hand.

• First, I’ve been using video during our lessons. My phone takes worse video than my point-and-shoot, but the playback screen on the phone is so much bigger that it works well to take phone video during our home practices. (The phone audio is atrocious, but I can edit the video and substitute the audio from my handheld recorder. Of course, this introduces further delay in doing anything blog-related with the videos and audio.)
• Second, I’ve been placing a mirror in front of M so she can watch herself.
• Third, I’ve been using a point system to judge each note she plays. As I’ve mentioned before, she loves getting scores. I have her play the first 10 notes of Andante, and give her a score of from 0 to 2 (or rarely, 3) for each melody note she plays. Some days, I give her a half a penny for each point she earns, which she gets excited about. But mostly, she just likes the instant feedback. What I’ve been surprised by is how much, and how quickly, she has internalized the standards — if she plays a 1 or a 0, she usually knows it. And she is so interested in getting a good score that she really concentrates on what she is doing.

I don’t have any recent audio or video ready to post, but I did finally get around to posting a few videos from November 11. I posted them on a backdated post for November 11 here (I’m trying to keep the blog in chronological order).