Best Age to Start Piano Lessons, 5 Reasons for 5 Years Old

Photo by Trey Ratcliff

Ability to recognize and comprehend symbols and representations

• Non-piano related activities that demonstrate this development are a child's ability to turn brooms into racehorses, and to participate in role-playing games as the mom or dad or Batman. Without this ability it's hard to translate musical symbols on a page into actionable keys on the piano. 

Developing Language Skills

• By this age, children have already mastered the alphabet and have started translating their oral language skills into reading and writing. This is a great time to introduce the language of music and its notations. Mastery of the alphabet is also important because the first 7 letters are used in the musical alphabet and the ability to say the first 7 letters forward and backward will benefit the child's note recognition. This also ties in with the previous point of understanding positional concepts: A is before B and F is after E, etc.

Improved Fine Motor Skills

• At this age, children have gained the ability to control and coordinate their bigger muscles; they start to play baseball, basketball, flag football, and learn to ride the bicycle. They've also started to gain finer control of their fingers, learning to tie shoelaces and to button their own shirts. This new development allows your child to start honing their fine motor control with piano lessons. And if they are not quite there yet, piano lessons can accelerate the process to improving fine motor control. I have taught many students that have improved their fine motor control dramatically within the first month of piano lessons. 

So you might have read already that 5 is a good age to start piano lessons. Most will also tell you that every child is different and that it varies. Some can start younger than 5, yet some won't be ready at 5. But what exactly makes 5 such a good age to begin piano lessons?

Starting with Jean Piaget's stages of child development; at the age of 5, children are in the Pre-operational stage which roughly consists of ages 2-7. The cognitive, motor, and language developments during this stage makes the age of 5 an exciting time to begin piano lessons. 

Ability to understand positional concepts like "above" and "below"

• This ability allows your child to understand notes that go "up" and "down" on the page and translate that to notes that go to the right and to the left of the keyboard. This recognition of patterns that go up and down and translation into finger movements is the key to being a proficient sight reader in music.

Beginning of Formal Schooling

• The start of formal schooling is a big change for children; most of them have never been away from their parents for daily extended periods of time. This change makes adapting to piano lessons easier in many ways. Besides establishing more independence from parents, starting school also gets your child to be more comfortable around other adults and authority figures. Your child will learn to understand the difference between right and wrong and the ability to follow rules. It is not uncommon for a child to ask their parents to not be present during piano lessons. I know because I was one of them. 

Share the Knowledge!

Now that you know these awesome reasons for the best age to start piano lessons, use the social buttons at the end of this post to share it with your friends and other parents! 

Here are some other great blog posts to read before starting piano lessons:
Best Instrument to Begin Music Lessons
4 Important Reasons for Having a Real 
Piano
Proper Sitting Position at the Piano

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