We live in a different time.  We are all so busy and there is technology everywhere.  Why learn to play an instrument when there is music available at the touch of a button everywhere?  Learning to play an instrument well takes a huge amount of time and commitment.  Precious minutes each day!  Are you a mother or father interested in having your young child play violin?  Are you interested in investing YOUR time with this child every single day to make the process go smoothly?  Your child will be able to take over the process of learning without you at about song ten in book 2:  Lully Gavotte.  It could take three years to reach that goal. 

Ten year old children can easily learn to play violin by THEMSELVES.  Perhaps it would be better to wait until THEN to start.  But young children who want to learn, five and six year olds, need a parent to sit beside them every day and to know how to help and guide little fingers along.  Can you and your child learn together to play violin?  It really all depends on YOU. 

I was a Suzuki mother sharing the Mother Tongue method with my five year old.  I was a Suzuki mom before I was a Suzuki teacher.  For seven years I spent time with my daughter each day playing the violin.  I played the cassette tape every day.  I got the violin out of the case, tuned it and rosined the bow.  I had ideas of games to play to determine which review songs to play first, and I had rewards built in too.  I realized that by being hands on before and during each lesson that she usually came to join me quickly instead of balking at the idea of playing.  25 years later, we still both have great memories of the time we spent together, just the two of us, after I got home from work each day. 

For the most part, Japanese mothers stayed home with the kids in apartments while fathers went off to work for long hours each day.  There was plenty of time for mothers and children to practice violin each day and to give demonstration concerts for the fathers when they got home. 

Dr Suzuki realized that although Japanese is one of the most difficult languages to learn, most Japanese kids managed to learn to speak it.  They watched their parents and practiced until they could reproduce the sounds that they heard. 

At this time he also noticed that musical prodigies:  Young children who learned to play instruments beautifully, were for the most part from rich families.  Families that could afford to go to concerts or own recordings of beautiful music. He wondered: if all children were given the opportunities to hear great music every day and to have child sized violins to play on, if every child could learn to play the violin.