Falling is Not Failing: The Training Wheels are Off!

by Drew Holmes

I was reading a recent Wall Street Journal article titled “Why Children Learn Better Than Adults” by Dr. Alison Gopnik, and was struck by how she was able to measure what I intuitively knew: kids learn differently than adults. What surprised me most is how different their motivations are for learning.

Dr. Gopnik explains how kids learn to explore, not exploit. They want knowledge for its own sake, rather than with a specific goal in mind. She and Dr. Emily Liquin conducted a “Learning Trap” experiment with groups of children and adults. In the experiment, there is a reward for figuring out a pattern, but a penalty for getting it wrong. The adults tended to accumulate more total rewards but took less risks to get them, thus not gaining complete knowledge of the pattern. The children tended to finish with less overall rewards (preferring to risk what they had to gain more information) but achieved a more complete understanding of the pattern.

The adults were seeking the rewards, the kids were seeking the knowledge.

My son Timothy, age 6, recently put this theory to the test. He loves riding his bike and does so with great skill — using training wheels. He was playing with a school friend and saw she was riding on only two wheels. He asked to try, and she agreed to let him ride her bike. There was some initial success, but when it came to making turns or maneuvering at low speeds he predictably fell. The outcome was not what he expected, so he quickly gave up. He was unable to immediately exploit the activity to achieve the desired result.

A couple of weeks had passed since that first attempt, and he expressed interest in trying again. I removed his training wheels, and we went out to our back alley (the closest patch of clear runway). Timothy proceeded to try to ride on two wheels and fell. Again and again he fell. He did alright on the straightaways but turns were still proving tricky as he was leaning the wrong way and toppling the bike.

As expected, Timothy requested I reinstall the training wheels. I would have been happy to do this, but I asked him to first listen to my ideas of how he could improve. After some instruction and a few more falls he finally got the concepts down. He still fell, but now it was following a successful loop or a not-so-perfect stop. He was still crashing, but this time he was smiling on the way down. Once falling was not failing he was able to stop trying to exploit the activity and instead explore it. He was able to teach himself how to learn to ride on two wheels.

The next day he was bombing up and down the alley, doing high speed power slide stops and low speed figure 8 loops.

I did not realize the struggle in his head until I read Dr. Gopnik’s article. He was of two minds. In one, he was the child exploring bike riding and all the joys and freedoms that would afford him. In the other, he was goal oriented like an adult. He had seen his friend do it, so he knew exactly what the outcome should be. From that moment on he was prioritizing minimizing failure because he had a picture in his head of what success looked like. This not only rendered him unwilling to fall, but also unwilling to fail.

The lesson relevant to music making is obvious. Why do kids tend to learn instruments faster than adults? I used to think it was because kids are accustomed to failure. Everything is new so they frequently pursue tasks at which they are not yet skilled. By comparison, ask any music teacher and they will tell you adult students are harder to teach. Now I know it is because adults approach music making intending to exploit the benefits of the activity while kids explore what it could be. We musicians must be mindful of this whether we are the ones learning a new instrument or instructing a beginner. Exploration is the first goal, exploitation comes later.

Timothy’s exploration on two wheels is just beginning. Now that he knows what is possible without training wheels, I can confidently say they are off permanently. Or at least until his baby brother is ready to ride a big bike.