Hello Minim Family,
There is a number that circulates in music education, and we have quoted it ourselves: that 85 percent of children who start private music lessons quit within one or two years. It gets repeated in seminars, in studio newsletters and on teaching blogs, almost always without a source attached.
We went looking for that source this month and could not find it. What we found instead was more useful than the number we were checking, and it changes when a parent should actually start worrying.
The short version. The 85 percent figure that gets attached to children quitting appears to belong to a different finding entirely: a Gallup survey commissioned by NAMM in 2003 found that 85 percent of the adults it surveyed regretted not learning to play an instrument. On when children actually stop, the best evidence we could find is a 2021 study in PLoS One that tracked 3,303 secondary school students in the UK and Germany. It found that about half stop playing by age 17, and that the drop-off peaks between 15 and 17, not in the first two years. Below: where each number really comes from, what our eight years of teaching in Tokyo suggest is the actual cause, and the four things we see keeping children playing.
Where the 85 percent number actually comes from
It is real. It is just about somebody else.
The figure traces to a Gallup survey of 1,005 people, commissioned by NAMM (the National Association of Music Merchants) and conducted between 4 February and 8 March 2003. In it, 85 percent of those surveyed said they regretted not learning to play an instrument, and 67 percent said they would still like to learn. That is a statement about adult regret. It says nothing about how many children stop lessons, or when.
Somewhere between that survey and the present, the number got attached to a claim it was never measuring. We are not going to pretend we caught this early. It appears in a seminar we ran, and we repeated it in good faith, because it turns up in respectable places with a confident tone and no footnote.
A statistic with no source attached is not evidence. It is a rumour with a decimal point.
When children actually stop playing
The honest answer is later than almost anyone expects.
The most solid study we could find is Nicolas Ruth and Daniel Müllensiefen's paper Survival of musical activities. When do young people stop making music?, published in PLoS One in 2021, which followed 3,303 secondary school students across the UK and Germany. About half of them had stopped their music lessons and musical activities by the time they turned 17, and the likelihood of stopping peaked between the ages of 15 and 17. At 17 the hazard rate reached 32 percent. The authors point to the ordinary upheaval of those years, and note that a weaker musical environment at home makes stopping more likely.
Two things follow, and both matter for the parent of a seven-year-old.
The first is that the dangerous window is adolescence, not the first two years. A four-month wobble in year one is not the beginning of the end. The second is that the home environment is one of the few things the research actually flags as protective, and it is the one thing a parent controls directly.
The research does not say your child will quit in two years. It says the risk arrives around 15, and that what happens at home in the meantime matters.
What we think the real cause is, after eight years
Research tells you when. Teaching tells you why.
In eight years of teaching across Tokyo international schools, the pattern we keep meeting is not laziness and it is not lack of talent. It is isolation. A child practises alone in a room, performs alone in front of adults, and measures themselves against a standard they cannot hear anyone else struggling with. Music becomes the one thing in their week with no teammates.
That is the reason our group ukulele programme exists in the form it does. It is built so children discover three things quickly: that playing music is fun, that playing together is better than playing alone, and that performing in front of people can be ordinary rather than frightening. Our youngest students play their first song in their first lesson, which sounds like a small thing and is not. A child who has played something recognisable on day one has a different relationship with the instrument than a child who has spent a month on posture.
It also shapes how we teach one-to-one. Responsive Education is Minim's name for a simple commitment: we start from what the child in front of us is actually responding to, and build the lesson from there rather than from a fixed sequence. In practice, that means a child who wants to play a song they love gets to play it sooner than a syllabus would allow.
In our experience, children rarely quit because music is hard. They quit because it is lonely.
Four things that keep a child playing
None of these is a trick, and all four are things we have watched work at Tokyo International School (TIS), at Nishimachi International School and at home in ordinary Tokyo apartments.
- Give them someone to play with. A group class, a sibling, a parent who plays badly and cheerfully. The research names the home musical environment as protective, and our own experience says peers do the same job. This is the single biggest lever, and most families do not think of it as one.
- Make practice short, frequent and ritual. Our 10-20-30 method is the long version. The compressed version: a few honest minutes on most days beats one heroic Sunday, and the ritual matters more than the minutes.
- Take correction out of the parent's job. Sitting nearby and staying interested is the contribution. Fixing fingers is the teacher's. If practice has become an argument in your house, our older piece on why we cannot teach our own children will feel uncomfortably familiar.
- Let the repertoire follow the child. A child who is allowed to bring in the song they are already humming will practise it without being asked. This is Responsive Education doing unglamorous work.
Three of these four cost nothing, and none of them requires your child to be talented.
When stopping is the right answer
We are not going to write a whole article about keeping children playing and then pretend that continuing is always correct.
Sometimes an instrument is genuinely the wrong instrument. A child who has spent two years on piano and lights up every time they touch a ukulele is telling you something worth listening to. Sometimes it is the format: a child who is invisible in a group may bloom one-to-one, and a child who is lonely in private lessons may need the group. If you are weighing that, our piece on group versus private lessons sets out where each one wins.
And sometimes the answer is a pause. A term off in a year with a house move, a new school or a new sibling is not a failure. We would far rather a family stop for six months and come back than grind through a year that ends the relationship with music permanently. The thing worth protecting is not the lesson slot. It is whether your child still wants to play at 25.
Given what the Gallup number actually measured, that last sentence is the whole argument.
What to ask when your child says they want to stop
Worth asking before you make any decision. The answers usually resolve the question by themselves.
- Is it the instrument, the teacher, the practising, or the performing? Those have four different solutions.
- When did this start, and what else changed that week?
- Would you rather play something else, or nothing at all?
- Would it be different if a friend were doing it with you?
- What is the last thing you played that you actually enjoyed?
- If we stopped for one term and then talked about it again, how would that feel?
FAQ
Do 85 percent of children really quit music lessons within two years?
We could not find a source for that claim, and we have stopped using it. The 85 percent figure appears to come from a 2003 Gallup survey commissioned by NAMM, in which 85 percent of 1,005 respondents said they regretted not learning an instrument. That is a finding about adult regret, not about children stopping. The best evidence we found on actual dropout is a 2021 PLoS One study of 3,303 UK and German secondary students, which found roughly half had stopped by age 17, with the peak between 15 and 17.
At what age are children most likely to quit music?
Between 15 and 17, according to the 2021 PLoS One study by Ruth and Müllensiefen, with the highest likelihood at 17. That is much later than the first year or two most parents brace for. Practically, it means an eight-year-old going through a flat patch is going through a flat patch, not leaving. It also means the work that protects a teenager from stopping, a home where music is normal and at least one person to play with, is work you do years before it is tested.
My child says they want to quit after six months. Should I let them?
Not immediately, and not as a discipline question either. In a first year, "I want to quit" usually means a specific piece got hard, or somebody was watching, or the lesson landed after a rough day at school. Ask which lesson rather than whether they want to continue. If the answer stays consistent across several weeks, and especially if it is the instrument rather than the practising, then a change of instrument, a change of format, or a term off is a reasonable and reversible response.
Does group or private make a difference to whether a child keeps playing?
In our experience, yes, though not in one fixed direction. Children who stop often describe music as something they do alone, and a group gives them peers who are visibly struggling with the same bar. That is why our afterschool ukulele classes are built around playing together from the first lesson. But some children get lost in a group and need the attention of one-to-one. The useful question is not which is better. It is which kind of loneliness your child is more at risk of.
If practice has gone quiet at your house
If your child is playing alone and it is starting to feel like a chore, the fix worth trying first is company rather than discipline. Our Minim Afterschool programmes run inside a number of partner schools and are built around children playing together from the first lesson, and our Ukulele Academy runs lessons for families who would rather start at home. If you are not sure which would suit your child, write to us and tell us a little about them. We would rather point you to the right thing than the nearest thing.
Love, all of us at Minim.
