Confession: I am not an artist. I can’t paint. I don’t play an instrument. My efforts on the dance floor reflect significantly more enthusiasm than rhythm and my singing voice is best heard during a rousing rendition of happy birthday, sung loudly by a crowd. My creative impulses, such as they are, tend to show up more in the kitchen and on the page than the easel or the stage. 

Nonetheless, I decided when my kids were little that I wanted to have each of them learn to play a musical instrument. I wasn’t motivated by any deep desire to raise the next Mozart. Given my own personal skill set I had zero expectation that my kids might be artistically talented in any respect. It was really about math. 

The word on the street back then was that studying music could help kids learn math. You should know that, compared to my math skills, my painting, dancing and singing skills are legend. So, as someone who considers herself math disabled, someone who knows how utterly unavoidable math is in elementary and high school, someone who still has periodic nightmares about facing Mr. Meehan’s algebra class, I thought, my kids are going to need all the math help they can get.

(I might have also had a vague fantasy or two involving Christmas carols and a spinet and the von Trappe family.)

When my oldest was five, and my youngest wasn’t even a flicker on the horizon, I announced a new rule: all the kids in our family will need to study music until the end of eighth grade. Kids are dumb. They have no idea how long “til the end of eight grade is.” So they were all like, yay!

When each of the oldest four turned five, they started taking piano lessons. My youngest started on the violin because I had more time then and she just looked so damn adorable playing it. But they all played.

In elementary school, they got involved with the school band and joined a summer music program run by the inestimable Dr. Jim Madden. They continued taking private lessons, but also played in school orchestras, ensembles, jazz groups, and archdiocesan honors programs. All but one continued music through high school. One continued through college. 

So I’ve had the opportunity to study the effects of a musical education over the long game and I’m here to tell you that math is the least of it.  But before I do, two caveats. 

First, my experience is primarily with music, but I know from talking with teachers and other parents and watching my kids’ friends and my friend’s kids go from preschool to elementary school to high school and beyond that the benefits I’m pointing out here are not limited to the study of music. They apply at least to the visual arts, theater, and dance as well. (They could even extend to dried noodle art and fashion design and paper mache, but I can’t speak to that.)

Second, and this is pivotal: your child does not have to be good at music – or art or dance or whatever – to reap the extraordinary benefits of studying it. I’m going to say it again: studying the arts is not about producing art. It’s unlike English or science or social studies, where the goal is to accumulate information that someone else discovered or wrote or decided and spit it back at the teacher on Tuesday morning at 10:30. The arts are about process, not product. 

In such a results-obsessed world, that alone is good reason to study them. It’s an intellectual breather, an academic change of scenery. 

That said, here are the reasons I think you should have your kids study the arts, starting as early and continuing as long as possible.

It Really Does Help Them Succeed at School

So let’s get this one out of the way first for all you number-crunchers out there who think, hey, my kid’s never going to earn a living playing the piccolo or reciting slam poetry. They should be focusing on their grades so they can get into a good school to study something practical, like computer science. 

Well, you kind of have a point. It turns out that, while studying the arts might boost a student’s standardized writing score, the evidence does not suggest that arts education impacts a students’ math, reading, or science achievement.

But – and this is a huge but – studying the arts shifts kids’ attitudes about school overall. My kids were lucky enough to go to schools with vibrant arts scenes, so their experiences with music and theater and dance and drawing were mostly at school, and I can tell you it made school so much more fun for them.

Not only that, studying music taught them how to learn. It taught them that learning is more a matter of practice than innate ability. In the early grades especially, it’s not always easy for kids to correlate the effort they put in with the results they get. I didn’t know how long Suzy Write studied for that math test, but I know I studied a lot. And she got an A and I got a . . . not A. (Still stings.) It’s easy to assume kids who do better are just smarter. 

Not so with music, for example. No matter how good Suzy is at math, if she didn’t practice Twinkle, Twinkle, she’s not going to be able to play it at her next lesson. And her teacher will be able to tell immediately and he’s going to call her out on it. The virtue of practice. It’s a beautiful thing. 

You don’t have to trust me on this, by the way. Studies have confirmed what teachers have long attested: arts education helps kids to develop social and emotional skills and bolsters their academic achievement. It enriches their experiences, improves focus, teaches self-control, and reduces stress.  A study by the Brookings Institution showed that instruction in the arts increases students’ engagement in school, helps them to enjoy school more, and makes them more inclined to aspire to college. Which means studying the arts might keep them happily engaged in school long enough to get that degree in computer science, or Elizabethan poetry or something else practical. 

It Allows Your Child to Tap into an Entirely Different Skill Set

Most academic classes are structured in fundamentally the same way. The teacher imparts knowledge to the students. The students repeat that knowledge back to the teacher. The teacher grades the students on how well they retained and repeated that knowledge. That’s how school generally works.

The problem is that’s not how the world generally works. In the world, people are expected to generate things. To innovate. To problem solve. To collaborate. To adapt. To work effectively with others to achieve goals together. Not to receive and repeat.

The arts are taught – and learned – in an entirely different way than the typical classroom. The teacher is a facilitator, offering knowledge and techniques, of course, but with the goal of having the student become the creator. The creation, itself, is the student’s alone.

The arts are also different in that perfection is not the goal. There is no one perfect way to draw a bowl of fruit. There are as many different ways to portray Beauty as there are the Beast. Even the greatest pianists in the world would have slightly different takes on Eine kleine Nachtmusik. 

The arts allow kids to learn by doing, a refreshing change from learning by listening. Even more importantly, especially in collective efforts like musical ensembles or group performances, kids are acutely aware of why they’re doing what they’re doing, an appreciation they may not experience in calculous. They have a song to master or a step to learn or a show to put on and they’re investing in and counting on one another for the success of that show. 

They’re forced to collaborate. To adapt. To work effectively with others to achieve goals together. Sound familiar?

It Lets Them Explore Parts of Themselves They Might Not Otherwise Know

As I said, the classroom isn’t everybody’s gig. If a kid consistently finds himself shy on the gold stars and high on the red x’s, it might start to feel like a pretty dreary place to be. He might start to think of himself as bad at school or, worse, someone with nothing special to offer. 

As long as you put in the effort, there really aren’t red x’s in the arts. If you miss a note on the big day, don’t worry about it, just keep playing. If you left the dagger for a fight scene stage left, improvise. If the dancer next to you stepped back when they should have stepped forward, work around it and make it look like that was the plan.

Kids who consider themselves middle of the pack academically could discover that they’re a wicked good mimic, or have a flare for the dramatic, or a gift for stage production. Or they might not discover any of those things. Instead, they might find themselves surrounded by people who are chasing their own passions, and being taken seriously for it. It might just inspire them to chase a passion of their own.

Most Importantly, the Arts are Filled With the Most Open, Accepting Students I’ve Ever Met

The Brookings Institution study found that schools with substantial offerings in the arts have fewer disciplinary issues. That students who received more arts education and experiences are more interested in how other people feel and more likely to want to help people who are treated badly. That elementary school students exposed to the arts were more inclined to draw upon works of art as a means for empathizing with others. The arts help kids develop social-emotional and interpersonal skills. 

I didn’t need a study to tell me that. I’ve seen it in spades. 

Most extracurriculars offer kids a sense of community and belonging. One of my daughters did student counsel. Another did mock trial. All of my kids were athletes. They had a lot of great experiences and learned a lot of great things from their advisors and coaches and teammates. But we’ve never come across a more open, accepting group of kids than we did in music.

They were just nice. Supportive. Encouraging. Sympathetic. Polite. No one was considered weird or less than. Every kid was accepted for who they were without question. 

The real reason I encourage you to get your kids into some form of the arts early on and to keep them in it for as long as you’re able is because the arts are about acceptance. If your child has a peer group made up of artists he will always find a place of acceptance. And when he goes through a rough patch socially or personally or with some of his other peer groups – as all of our kids do – he will have a soft place to land, even if only for a little while. 

I once mentioned this observation to the aforementioned esteemed Dr. Madden after a Wissahickon Pops performance at a local retirement community. These are the nicest group of kids I’ve ever met. Is it always like this? Dr. Madden smiled at me. Every year. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years and every single year they’re the nicest kids. I think it’s because you can’t “win” at band. If you want to make music together you have to be truly together.

He was right. One of my sons struggles with ADHD. It frustrated him in the classroom. His frenetic speech and perpetual motion challenged his ability to follow directions and remember things and keep friends. But he played the trumpet. 

And he was terrible. Awful. More interested in tricking the other trumpet players into jumping in early than in actually playing the piece. He was so bad, and he battled me so much about practice, that I cut him loose from the eighth grade rule in seventh grade. 

What did he turn around and do the first day of high school? Join the band.