Do Music Lessons Build a Child's Self-Discipline?

By ABC Academy of Music teaching team · Updated August 2026

“Music lessons teach discipline.” You have probably heard that claim from a teacher, a brochure, or another parent at pickup. It has a certain logic. Learning an instrument means practicing on days you do not feel like it. It means working toward a recital months away. Parents ask us directly: “Will music lessons actually teach my child self-control?” This piece is part of a series. See also music and brain development and music and school performance. This piece asks a narrower question. Does training build real, measurable self-discipline? Or is that mostly a story we tell about kids who already had those traits before they picked up an instrument? We checked the original source for every claim below. See our full Music Education Research hub for every study behind our program.

The Central Finding: Personality Predicts Who Takes Lessons

The most direct research on music and personality does not start with lessons changing a child. It starts with the child’s personality before lessons ever begin.

Two Canadian studies (2013) tested university students and children ages 10 to 12. Both measured the “Big Five” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Both also measured how much music training each person had, and for how long.

In both age groups, personality predicted music training about as well as thinking ability did, sometimes better. Among the children, openness was the strongest predictor of how long a child had studied music. Conscientiousness played a different role. Musically trained kids tend to get better grades than their IQ alone would predict. Conscientiousness explained much of that gap. Once researchers held it steady, the link between training and grades got weaker. In plain terms: lessons probably did not make these kids more careful and disciplined. It looks more like disciplined kids stuck with lessons. That same trait is part of why they did better in school.

A Canadian follow-up study (2015) tested 170 children ages 7 to 9, along with their parents. Two traits predicted how long a child stuck with lessons: the child’s own agreeableness, and the parent’s openness. The parent effect held up even after controlling for the child’s own intelligence and personality. Researchers call this pattern “niche-picking.” In the researchers’ own words, curious, motivated families “seek out intellectually enriching activities.” Music lessons are just one example. The lessons do not create the trait. The trait, often passed down from a parent, points a family toward lessons in the first place.

What We Already Covered, and Why This Article Goes Further

Our companion article on school performance covered a 2025 review pooling ten training studies in children ages 3 to 6. It found small-to-medium gains in focus, memory, and flexible thinking. Those are real, useful skills. They are not the same as everyday self-discipline. Sitting through boring practice. Choosing a bigger reward later over a smaller one now. Sticking with something through failure. This article looks at that narrower, more personal kind of discipline. The evidence here is thinner and more mixed.

The Delay-of-Gratification Evidence

Delay of gratification is a specific, testable skill: can a child choose a bigger reward later over a smaller reward right now? It is one of the closest things psychologists have to a lab measure of self-discipline. Two studies have tested it directly against music training. Neither is a clean, sweeping win for the claim.

The larger one is also one of the few truly randomized trials in this field. Researchers studied El Sistema, a national youth orchestra program in Venezuela, publishing results in 2017. Program spots were limited. So the team used a real lottery. That created a genuine randomized control group.

After one year, children who got a spot showed a small gain in self-control, and a small drop in behavior problems. Both results were only barely statistically significant. Most other measures showed no real effect. The clearest benefit showed up in one group: boys who had faced violence at home before the study started. For the full sample, the honest description is a small, borderline result, even with real random assignment behind it.

A smaller, more recent study points the same direction. A randomized experiment (2026) tested 67 preschoolers, ages 4 to 5, over 8 weeks. Children were split into a percussion group, an integrated-music group, or a control group. Teachers rated each child’s self-control before and after. Both music groups scored higher than the control group by the end. This was a real randomized design, which is a strength. It was also a short program, a small sample, and a teacher rating rather than a real test of a child choosing between two rewards. Treat it as a modest, early signal, not a settled finding.

A Long-Term Study That Found a Real Effect, and Flagged Its Own Limits

One more study measured delay of gratification directly, with a real behavior task, and found a clearer effect. It just was not randomized.

US researchers, at the University of Southern California, followed children from lower-income communities starting around age 6 or 7. One group took community music training. A separate group did sports. A third did neither. The team published a paper in 2019. After three years, the music group was far more likely than the control group to choose a bigger, delayed reward. Saving candy, for example, over a smaller, right-now one. That gap was large.

The researchers were careful about what this study could and could not show. Families chose which program to join. Nobody was randomly assigned. The authors wrote plainly that “children with inherent musical motivation persisted in the music training program.” The study could not rule out earlier differences in home life. It could not rule out parent motivation either. This is the same self-selection problem the personality studies describe, showing up again in a different design.

What Practice Habits Actually Look Like

A separate line of research asks a simpler question. What do music students actually do while they practice? A large UK study (2012) asked 3,325 young musicians, from beginners to conservatory students, how they organized their practice. Students at higher skill levels reported more planning, more focused work on trouble spots, and more careful blending of sections into a full piece. Researchers see this kind of planning as a form of self-regulated learning. The study describes what advanced students do. It does not prove that lessons caused this skill, rather than more disciplined students simply being the ones who reached advanced levels.

A smaller, earlier US study gets closer to the practice room itself. In 2008, a researcher videotaped 16 middle-school instrumentalists practicing a new piece, then asked each one what strategy they had just used. Repetition came up more than any other strategy by far. With only 16 students and no comparison group, this describes a skill in action. It does not measure whether music training builds that skill more than any other structured, effortful activity would.

What About “Grit”? A Framework Nobody Has Tested Here

Psychologist Angela Duckworth built a research framework around one word: grit, meaning sustained passion and drive toward a long-term goal. She published a validated US test for it in 2009. Dozens of studies use it now. Using that test, grit has predicted GPA gains in teenagers. It has predicted staying power at a US military academy. It has predicted how far spelling-bee competitors advance.

We could not find a peer-reviewed study that gives young music students the Grit Scale under a controlled design. None that tests whether years of lessons predict a higher grit score. The framework is well-validated elsewhere. It has simply not, as far as we could check, been carefully applied to music training. Anyone who tells you “research proves music lessons build grit,” pointing to Duckworth’s actual tool, is going further than the published evidence supports. The closer, real evidence on this question is the delay-of-gratification and personality research described above.

What This All Adds Up To

A few things rest on real, checkable ground. A genuine randomized trial in Venezuela found a small, borderline gain in self-control after one year of training, with a stronger benefit for one at-risk group. A small randomized preschool study found a similar small benefit. A long-term study using a real delay-of-gratification task found a much larger effect, though its own authors said the design could not rule out self-selection.

Other things point the other way. Two well-designed Canadian studies looked at personality traits, especially openness and conscientiousness. Both predict who takes lessons, and for how long, at least as well as intelligence does. One found that conscientiousness, not the training itself, explained much of why musically trained kids outperform their IQ-predicted grades. This mirrors the “niche-picking” pattern in our companion article on school performance. Families and children with certain traits already in place are the ones who choose music lessons, and stick with them.

The honest summary is not “music lessons teach discipline,” stated as settled fact. It is that a few careful, small studies show real, modest self-control benefits from training, including one genuine randomized trial. Set against that is equally real evidence that careful, curious children and families are the ones who choose lessons to begin with. That runs some of the link backward from the popular claim. Both things can be true about the same children at once. Fully untangling how much of each is at work is not possible with the studies that exist today. For more on how music shapes a child’s mind, see our companion article on music and child brain development. For the science behind musical creativity, see music and creativity.

Music Lessons at ABC Academy of Music

We think the real research is more interesting, and more honest, than a slogan. It does not support “music lessons teach discipline” as a blanket guarantee. It does support a real, if modest, self-control benefit from structured training, shown in at least one genuine randomized trial. Set alongside that is equally real evidence that families with certain traits already in place are the ones who choose lessons to begin with. If you want your child to build real, steady practice habits, we offer structured lessons on piano, guitar, drums, and voice, taught by trained teachers. Browse our class schedule to find the right age group and instrument. Visit our rates and payment page for current pricing, or contact us with questions about getting started at one of our Toronto-area studios.