My daughter cried before every piano lesson for a year before I stopped the ABRSM madness

Every Sunday morning for approximately fourteen months, my daughter cried in the lift going down to the car. Not dramatically. Not a tantrum. Just quietly, with her piano bag on her shoulder and her face turned slightly away from me, as if she was trying to grieve the next two hours in private.

I noticed this. I want to be clear that I noticed this and kept going anyway. In the language of tiger parenting, this is called perseverance. What it actually was, I now understand, was me outsourcing my own anxiety about her future onto a seven-year-old in a lift in Sha Tin.

The backstory: my daughter started piano at age five, which is completely normal in Hong Kong. She liked it. She had a reasonable ear, her teacher said, and good finger coordination for her age. The teacher — quietly, as a suggestion — mentioned ABRSM when my daughter turned six. I heard this as a mission statement. By the time she was seven, we were doing Grade 2. By the time she was crying in the lift, we had begun preparation for Grade 4 and she was practising forty minutes a day on a schedule I had drawn up on a spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet. I had a spreadsheet for my seven-year-old's piano practice schedule. Let that sentence sit.

ABRSM — the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music — is genuinely prestigious and genuinely useful if you want to pursue music seriously or use music qualifications for certain school applications. In Hong Kong, the ABRSM Grade 8 has become a kind of unofficial extracurricular currency, an item on a secondary school application that signals discipline and long-term commitment. Many Hong Kong parents pursue it for exactly this reason, and the system has developed accordingly. There are teachers who do nothing but ABRSM prep. There are tutorial centres specifically for music grades. There are parents who have mapped out an eight-year plan from Grade 1 to Grade 8 before the child has touched a piano.

I was not quite that parent. But I was adjacent to that parent, and I was getting closer every week.

What changed: I came home one afternoon to find my daughter at the piano, playing. Not practising. Just playing — something she'd made up herself, a small wandering melody that had nothing to do with her Grade 4 pieces. She didn't know I was there. She was completely absorbed. When she heard me and stopped, she got that particular look on her face — a kind of guilty collapse — as if she'd been caught doing something she wasn't supposed to.

She was apologising to me for playing the piano for fun.

I don't want to be dramatic about this moment, but it was the moment I understood what I had done. I had taken something she loved and turned it into something she owed me. The crying in the lift wasn't about the lesson. It was about the lesson representing everything the piano had become — a performance, a grade, a credential, a thing she was being measured against. When had anyone last asked her what she liked about playing?

We had a conversation that evening. Not the kind of conversation I usually have with her about practice and effort and long-term goals. An actual conversation where I asked her what she liked and didn't like about piano. She said she liked making things up. She liked playing songs she heard in films. She liked her teacher when her teacher wasn't doing exam prep. She didn't like scales. She didn't like playing the same sixteen bars a hundred times until it was exam-ready. She didn't like Sundays.

We paused ABRSM for a year. Her teacher, who I suspect had been waiting for this conversation, visibly relaxed. They started learning film music. My daughter started choosing what she wanted to work on. The crying stopped. Not gradually — immediately, the next Sunday morning. She still does piano. She is, in some technical sense, "behind" where she would be on the ABRSM progression if we'd kept going.

I can live with that. She cannot tell you what Grade 4 scales sound like. She can play the Interstellar theme in a version she arranged herself, and she plays it with the face of someone who means it.

The ABRSM grade is useful. It's not the point. For some children it's motivating. For others it turns the thing they love into the thing they dread. Learn which your child is before you commit to eight years of Sunday mornings in a lift.