How to Get Your Grandkids Interested in Playing Guitar

It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon. The grandkids are visiting and you’ve got the guitars out and your jamming some Americana with them and having a great time showing them the next lick in the song…

While talking about the upcoming release of How to Teach Guitar, one reader sent an email asking how they could get their grandchildren interested in learning the guitar.

Maybe you can picture the scene - sitting down with the grandkids on a Sunday afternoon and playing a few songs together on guitar. It’s a nice image!

So let’s talk about a few ideas that can help get those kids interested in picking up guitar…

The Challenge

The main challenge is going to be other things competing for their attention - namely video games and doom scrolling. If they are addicted to their devices it’s going to be an uphill struggle to get them to do anything else.

The second “problem” is that you can’t force someone to be interested in something. If they have no interest in learning an instrument, that’s ok, try and find something they do have an interest in and encourage that. Trying to make children learn an instrument when they don’t want to is a sure-fire way to make them hate the instrument and hate learning music in general.

What Can Be Done?

Children are naturally curious and love to be involved in whatever it is you’re doing. Assuming their brain hasn’t been destroyed by endless hours of social media, the best thing you can do is to play guitar around them. Have a noodle to yourself while they’re around and see if it sparks their curiosity. Have them come see you perform at small gigs with your friends. Learn a song and see if they want to sing along with you.

If they see you having fun, they’re going to want to be involved somehow.

They Want to Learn… What Next?

If they are interested, the most important thing is to give them little easy wins as soon as possible. Don’t spend a week teaching them how to tune the guitar - tune it for them and show them a simple, easy riff they can play right away.

You can take some famous rock riffs and create easy versions that just use the low E string - if the riff is in the same key so they can play along to the song, even better. Depending on their age, you can take some simple classical melodies or nursery rhymes, create a tab and go through the song with your grandkids.

Little bite-size lessons where they can pick something up in about five minutes are perfect. Don’t worry about them playing it perfectly, get them doing something nad having fun with it.

Don’t Kill Their Motivation

If they do show an interest and you start teaching them, it’s important to let them work at their own pace.

While it would be great if they would be intrinsically motivated to practice for a few hours a day, they probably won’t be, and pressuring or hassling them into practising will quickly lead to them viewing learning guitar as a punishment, rather than a fun activity they look forwards to with you.

An intrinsic motivation can take years to develop - as they slowly accrue skills, they’ll start to be interested in what else they can learn and applying those skills to learning songs on their own.

Let them learn at their own pace - there’s no rush, and when they’re older, they’ll thank you for it.