Many parents and teachers are captivated by Dr. Suzuki\u2019s vision to teach music through love and joy. They yearn for a way of teaching music that is as joyful and as natural as a child learning to speak their native tongue. Yet, instead of music practice filled with the equivalent of a toddler\u2019s happy babble, practice can often become tense, ineffective, and even angry. Even if the adult and child have a loving relationship, emotions become heightened as a parent is \u201cjust trying to help!\u201d and a child is bored, checked out, or frustrated. No matter how tightly you hold the ideal of \u201cnurture by love,\u201d parents and teachers are begging and bribing students to just get through the requisite repetitions. They need a map back to practice that builds connection rather than breaks it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Play creates that map. Infants, toddlers, teens, and adults all need play to learn and connect to their community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The smarter the species, the more they play (Mardell et al. 2023, 39). Cats, pigs, rats, otters, crows and even Komodo dragons have all been shown to play. Scientists have theorized for decades why species would spend so much precious energy playing<\/em>. Previously, the prevailing theory was that play was to prepare for adult behavior; i.e., wolf pups stalking mom to prepare to hunt later in life. More recent research, however, suggests that play is for cognitive development, social connection, and emotional regulation (Ackerman 2020, 05:34:16), (Brown and Vaughan 2009). Just as lab rats need to learn to manage their stress through play (Mardell et al. 2023, 38), music students need play to handle the stress of trying new things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because play is the work of childhood, \u201cwork\u201d feels like a distraction from a child\u2019s true purpose. Play is motivating (Mardell et al. 2023, 148). It deepens their connection both with the other people engaged in the activity, and with the activity itself. Neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang has written, \u201cIt is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don\u2019t care about (Lahey 2016).\u201d If we want music students to be thoughtful, expressive musicians, we have to find some way to get them to care about their music-making. No sticker chart or reward system has ever done that. Play can. <\/p>\n\n\n While free play is valuable and must be protected, the play created in music lessons and practice is of a different type. Sometimes described as play with a purpose<\/em> (Mardell et al. 2023, 16) or deliberate play <\/em>(Grant 2023, 92), this kind of play can be directed by a teacher or parent towards the acquisition of a particular skill. Deliberate play goes beyond the behavioral model of counting correct repetitions, to a focus on experience and inquiry. It is the difference between teaching to the goal (test or recital), and engaging a child’s full body and mind in the process of learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much has been written in recent years about the benefits of deliberate practice, while research in deliberate play is in its infancy. A recent study of young basketball players in Brazil compared deliberate practice to deliberate play by randomly assigning players to a group that played a variety of made-up games or a group that used traditional drills (Grant 2023, chap. 4). The groups that had participated in the playful challenges (such as assigning certain players to only pass and not shoot,) outperformed the control group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Play is not a diversion from work. Indeed, play and work can be closely wound together. Play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith wrote, \u201cThe opposite of play is not work, it is depression\u201d (Bogost 2016, 98). Play is the gateway to engaged learning. Categorizing something as play does not take any of the difficulty or rigor away, only the overwhelming misery. When children feel they are working, they avoid what feels hard. When children are playing, they prefer to be in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD); the range of skills that are just on the edge of their ability (Mardell et al. 2023, 148). The too-easy or too-hard task does not engage their creativity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A skilled teacher, using a playful attitude, can guide a child right to their personal ZPD. Some may worry that a child won\u2019t enjoy adult-directed deliberate play with all of its limitations on their behavior. However, these same limitations of adult-directed deliberate play can open up new ideas and opportunities a child may not have come up with on their own. Igor Stravinsky believed that \u201cthe more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free\u201d (Stravinsky 1947). Limitations can add to art and to fun. Soccer wouldn\u2019t be nearly as fun without the limitations of not using your hands. So too, lessons, with their boundaries and rules, can be an incredible opportunity for play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Free play is essential for children and needs to be protected by their parents (Mardell et al. 2023, 148). Children need protected time in the calendar both for deliberate play and free play. To encourage musical free play, parents can offer access to toy instruments\u2014drums, ukuleles, recorders, and time for improvisation. This time will help children feel more connected to their identity as a musician as well as build musical skill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some efforts to gamify education become a distraction from what is best and most interesting about a subject. Play designer and philosopher Ian Bogost describes this as \u201cchocolate-covered broccoli\u201d (Bogost 2016, 59). Broccoli can be delicious, but its value is degraded when covered up by rich chocolate. Designing our play and games to celebrate the intrinsic traits of music, rather than just trying to entertain, is like sprinkling oil and salt on broccoli. It brings out the delicious flavor already there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fun toys and cute worksheets invite whimsy, but it\u2019s not quite the same thing as play. Music practice is satisfying in the way it invites the individual to solve puzzles, express emotions, and communicate nonverbally. Focusing play in those areas builds a child\u2019s internal motivation to practice over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Animals use nonverbal cues to help a potential play partner know that they\u2019re starting play and not a fight (Brown and Vaughan 2009). When a dog wants to play, they wag their tail and bow. When a baboon wants to play, they bend down and look between their legs. When humans want to play, they smile, laugh, and make eye contact. Most adults don\u2019t need to make radical changes to musical practice to invite children to play, just a few shifts in attitude make a world of difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our family dog, Walter, is an excellent example of a great play companion. When he wants to play with his tug toys, he calibrates according to his play companion. If he pulled as hard as he could, he\u2019d pull the child over, making them cry, and his play time would be over very quickly. When he plays with our four-year-old, he pulls gently. When he plays with our eight-year-old son, he pulls harder. When he brings the tug toy to me, he pulls as hard as he can. Without any verbal language, he intuits how to play fairly with each playmate. The goal is not to win, but to make play last longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Children are very aware of the power differential between themselves and adults. They might wonder why they would want to play with someone who is always going to be bigger, smarter, and more capable than they are. To invite a child to play, the adult has to find ways of diminishing their own power. They may give decision-making power to a coin toss, dice roll, or timer, or they may pretend to have less ability and knowledge than they really do. Teacher Trainer Linda Fiore is a master of this. When talking to a student she\u2019ll describe a basic idea and then stop to think of the word (which she already knows). Giving the student the opportunity to help her engages them in the conversation and builds their confidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Practicing music can feel scary and overwhelming. Children want to prove their smarts, talent, and ability, yet they keep butting heads against skills that are difficult. They may start obsessing over mistakes and losing emotional control at every challenge. To help children relax and get into a playful and curious mindset, mistakes should be met with a shrug, a laugh, and congratulations (\u201cHooray! That was a great mistake. Now I really know you\u2019re ready to learn.\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Keeping children in the Zone of Proximal Development helps them feel psychologically safe. Behaviors and ideas in their ZPD are engrossing and even funny (Cohen 2001, 82). Imagine a baby playing peek-a-boo. As a baby is just learning about object permanence, the disappearance and reappearance of a smiling face is endlessly entertaining. So too my four-year-old pre-twinkler laughs and engages when I point at his cello bridge and say, \u201cThis is the fingerboard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNo, silly Mom! That\u2019s the bridge!\u201d he exclaims, then whispers, \u201cRight?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n Find ways to make it humorous. Get it wrong on purpose, like I did with my four-year-old. Play a silly animal sound on your instrument like Dr. Timothy Durbin often does in lessons. Use a silly voice. Make up ridiculous rhymes as lyrics to the piece they\u2019re learning. For younger students, it will invite a giggle. For older students, you may have to adjust the humor, but an eye roll is nearly as empowering as a laugh. Most adolescents spend most of their time worrying that they are not cool enough (Cohen 2001, 164). Offer them the gift of being cooler than you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Toddlers and preschoolers define play as something they choose (Cohen 2001, 10). The deliberate play of music practice and lessons may have fewer choices than free play, but can still invite their participation in decision-making. One of the simplest, yet most impactful ways to incorporate this into a music lesson, is to let the child choose if a repetition \u201ccounts\u201d or not. Once a student knows what I\u2019m looking for, they are often much pickier even than I am. Most importantly, they become engaged. They cease to just go through the motions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Elementary school-aged children define play as something they do with their friends (Cohen 2001, 10). Inspired by this idea, my co-teacher and sister Brecklyn Ferrin and I changed our group classes from monthly to weekly. We have seen incredible engagement in our students as they develop deeper friendships. I particularly love watching the children as they participate in Music Mind Games. While most people would describe learning music theory as dry and boring, by doing it with other peers, the children are engaged and excited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end of the school year, we hosted a \u201cViolympics\u201d event. Combining two play features\u2014choice and peers\u2014we asked the students to help us create the rules for our events. While discussing an event for the longest continual sustained bow sound, one of the older students suggested that everyone should have to use the youngest student\u2019s bow, essentially evening the playing field to make it more fun for everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Child psychologists have found that children evolve through a few phases of play (Fromberg and Bergen 2015, 11). While children usually start with functional play as babies and evolve to games with rules as older children, each phase can be used and enjoyed at any time, including adulthood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the exploratory play of the baby banging on the pot. In my early days of teaching, I insisted that parents allow their children only to interact with their instrument in the pre-ordained ways we had practiced in their lesson. Knowing just enough about behavioral science to be dangerous but not helpful, I thought that practicing with a poor bow hand would ruin their habits forever. I now believe that students should be able to experiment with the sounds of their instrument, when given instructions on how to care for their instrument and with age-dependent supervision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Incorporate this concept by using your body. Get away from the instrument and test body balance, finger strength, shoulder range of motion, etc. Bounce a small bouncy ball to prepare your wrist for sautill\u00e9 bow stroke. Pinch clothespins to build finger strength.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once children understand the physical properties of their toy, they can start to use it towards a certain goal such as building a block tower. Experimenting with their instrument will help a child understand the mechanics of tone much more quickly than verbal instruction. As Michiko Yurko, the inventor of Music Mind Games, wrote, \u201cStudents remember what they do for themselves.\u201d While some principles can be taught through explicit instruction, others can only be learned by being given an opportunity to think (Fromberg and Bergen 2015, 198). Constructive play gives that opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Incorporate these ideas using the following exercises:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Symbolic\/Fantasy Play is when children start playing pretend: store, doctor, school, restaurant, etc. This can be incorporated into music education in a variety of ways. The pianist Lang Lang wrote that when he was beginning to compete as a child, he loved stories of great Kung Fu fighters. As he walked on stage he would think of himself as \u201cPiano Master of the Eighth Region, the King of Chinese Piano\u201d (Lang Lang 2007). Ask your students to pretend to play like their favorite superhero or character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Imaginative roles are a place where parents can really shine. As a parent tries on different roles in practice, a child will often follow. Here are some other roles parents can try:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Be the fool<\/strong>. Let the child have a turn to be the competent one. This is easy if you\u2019re a practice parent who doesn\u2019t know how to play the instrument. Try playing their instrument and fail miserably. If you do know how to play their instrument, pretend<\/em>. It\u2019s fun. \u201cYou hold the bow in the middle, right? And the violin goes on my head?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The obsessive fan. <\/strong>\u201cWow, that phrasing was just [sigh] amazing! Can I keep your used tissue for all time? It\u2019s just so special to me now. Wow, the best musician of all time. Wow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Television reporter. <\/strong>\u201cHere we are in the Clawson house. Amelia has just finished playing through Bach Double. Please tell us, what section was easiest? What part was hardest? How was your intonation today? How about your tone?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Older children start playing established games with rules, including basketball, soccer, hopscotch, go fish, and chess. Some of these are complicated, but you can easily make up a game by just adding one unnecessary obstacle. In a musical context, you could play a review song, but hum all the \u201cA\u2019s\u201d. Or play a review song with only one finger. Or play with stiff elbows. The possibilities are endless, and feel empowered to experiment freely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is playful for one person isn\u2019t necessarily playful for another. Everyone is drawn to different kinds of play. Stuart Brown, clinical researcher and head of the National Institute for Play, has proposed several different play personalities: The Joker, The Kinesthete, The Director, The Explorer, The Competitor, The Collector, The Artist\/Creator, and The Storyteller (Brown and Vaughan 2009). Experimenting with a student\u2019s play personality may offer more ideas to engage them in music practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All the above are merely invitations to play. \u201cIt is the child . . . who must give meaning to the play\u201d (Fromberg and Bergen 2015, 26). A parent or teacher may offer everything they can think of to help a child enter the play state, but if a child is too tired, hungry, or emotionally overwhelmed, it may not work. Still, these play invitations keep the door open for the next lesson or practice session.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I first started researching play in education out of a desire to motivate checked out students and decrease arguments with my own children in practice. And certainly, more playful practice sessions have done those things marvelously (though of course it\u2019s still difficult.) But just as important as what play has done for my students, is what it has done for me. In the past, I tried to stay in a patient and loving posture through sheer force of will, making me feel more and more burned out, tense, and exhausted at the end of the day. Channeling that energy into creating opportunities for play has created more energy, rather than diminishing it. In other words, playing has done for me exactly what it does for species across the animal kingdom, regulated my emotions and prepared me to learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supplementary Resources<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ackerman, Jennifer. The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think<\/em>. New York: Penguin Press, 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bogost, Ian. Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games<\/em>. New York: Basic Books, 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Brown, Stuart, and Christopher Vaughan. Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul<\/em>. New York: Avery, 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fromberg, Doris Pronin, and Doris Bergen. Play from Birth to Twelve: Contexts, Perspectives, and Meanings<\/em>. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grant, Adam. Hidden Potential<\/em>. New York: Viking, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kohn, Alfie. Punished by Rewards<\/em>. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lahey, Jessica. \u201cTo Help Students Learn, Engage the Emotions.\u201d Well<\/em> (blog), The New York Times<\/em>, May 4, 2016. Accessed [June 18, 2025]. https:\/\/archive.nytimes.com\/well.blogs.nytimes.com\/2016\/05\/04\/to-help-students-learn-engage-the-emotions\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lang Lang. Lang Lang: Playing with Flying Keys<\/em>. As told to Michael French. New York: Delacorte Press, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mardell, Ben, Jen Ryan, Mara Krechevsky, Megina Baker, Savhannah Schulz, and Yvonne Liu Constant. 2023. A Pedagogy of Play: Supporting Playful Learning in Classrooms and Schools<\/em>. Cambridge, MA: Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. https:\/\/pz.harvard.edu\/resources\/a-pedagogy-of-play<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stravinsky, Igor. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons<\/em>. Translated by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yun, Andrea. “Cellympics: A Celebration to Playfully Expand Technique and Build Community.” American String Teacher<\/em> 70, no. 4 (November 2020): 54\u201356. https:\/\/www.andreayun.com\/_files\/ugd\/eac6c9_a48495f4dfcb4ff584eab8ca17890cf4.pdf<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yurko, Michiko. Music Mind Games<\/em>. Miami: Warner Bros. Publications, 1992.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/suzukiassociation.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Deliberate-Play-Venn-Diagram-1024x724.png\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDeliberate Play<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
A Warning<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Setting the Stage for Play<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Stay in the Zone (of Proximal Development)<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/suzukiassociation.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/cello-practice-in-costume-768x1024.jpg\")
Increase the Humor<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Offer Choice<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Invite Peers<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Phases of Play<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
1. Functional Play<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
2. Constructive Play<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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3. Symbolic\/Fantasy Play<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
4. Games with Rules<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Play Personalities<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Conclusion<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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