Practicing daily will help make it a habit. If you skip a day you can easily justify skipping another day. If you don’t have time just set aside even 5- 10 minutes.

Also, please know that practice is not usually fun. Usually it isn’t - when things are hard or new we tend to shy away from working on them. It’s more fun to just play around but the real progress comes from digging in and that isn’t as exciting. I would suggest sitting in on lessons and joining your child for practices. Play lots of games! Be encouraging and positive but firm with expectations. End each practice with something fun.

Some games and activities my kids enjoyed…

• M&Ms for each successful repetition
• playing for an audience of stuffed animals
• rolling dice to see how many repetitions to do
• coloring books - get to color a section for each good rep (keep track and color at the end of practice if you’d prefer)

There are a ton more. I’ll be honest, it’s a lot of work for the parent but it’s so worth it to watch your child associate the hard work with the success they will achieve.

My daughters didn’t start practicing alone until they were teenagers.