“Music lessons teach discipline.” You have probably heard that claim from a teacher, a school brochure, or another parent at pickup. It has a certain logic. Learning an instrument means practicing on days you do not feel like it, working toward a recital months away, and playing the same four bars over and over until they stop sounding wrong. This is a companion piece to our articles on music and brain development and music and school performance, which covered IQ, grades, and general executive function. This one asks a narrower question: does music training build measurable self-discipline, self-control, or grit, or is that mostly a story we tell about kids who already had those traits before they picked up an instrument? We checked the primary source for every claim below. For the full set of data behind our program decisions, see our full Music Education Research hub.
The Central Finding: Personality Predicts Who Takes Lessons
The most direct research on music and personality does not start with music lessons changing a child. It starts with the child’s personality before lessons ever begin.
In 2013, researchers Kathleen Corrigall, E. Glenn Schellenberg, and Nicole Misura published two studies in Frontiers in Psychology. The first tested 118 university students. The second tested 167 children, ages 10 to 12. Both studies 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 cognitive ability did, sometimes better. Among the children, openness-to-experience was the strongest personality predictor of how long a child had studied music. Conscientiousness played a different role. Musically trained children tend to get better grades than their IQ alone would predict. The researchers found conscientiousness explained much of that gap. Once they held conscientiousness constant, the link between music training and grades weakened. In plain terms: it is not obviously that lessons made these kids more conscientious. It looks more like conscientious kids stuck with lessons, and conscientiousness is also part of why they did better in school.
A 2015 follow-up study by Corrigall and Schellenberg 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-to-experience. The parent effect held up even after controlling for the child’s own intelligence and personality. The authors used a specific term for this: niche-picking. Their own words were direct. Curious, motivated families and children “seek out intellectually enriching activities, including but not limited to music lessons.” The lessons do not create the trait. The trait, often inherited from a parent, points a family toward lessons in the first place.
Executive Function We Already Covered, and Why This Article Goes Further
Our companion article on school performance covered a 2025 meta-analysis by Yang Lu, Liu Shi, and Ahmed Faisal Musib, pooling ten training studies in children ages 3 to 6. It found small-to-medium gains in inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Those are real, useful skills. They are not the same thing as self-discipline in the everyday sense: sitting through boring practice, choosing a bigger reward later over a smaller one now, or persisting through failure toward a distant goal. This article looks at that narrower, more personal kind of discipline. The evidence here is thinner and more mixed than the general executive-function research.
The Delay-of-Gratification Evidence: One Large Randomized Trial, One Small One
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, and neither one is a clean, sweeping win for the claim.
The larger one is also one of the few truly randomized trials in this field. Researchers Xiomara Aleman, Patrick McEwan, and five colleagues studied El Sistema, Venezuela’s national youth orchestra program, publishing results in Prevention Science in 2017. This was not a comparison of kids who signed up against kids who did not. Program slots were limited, so researchers used a real lottery-style process: about half of 2,914 applicants, ages 6 to 14, got an admission offer for one year, and the other half got one the following year. That gap created a genuine randomized control group.
After one year, children offered a spot showed a small improvement in self-control, about one-tenth of a standard deviation, and a similarly small drop in behavioral difficulties. Both results were significant only at the loosest common statistical threshold, once the researchers corrected for testing many outcomes at once. Most other measures showed no significant effect. The clearest benefit showed up in one subgroup: boys who had been exposed to violence at home before the study started. For the full sample, the honest description is a small, borderline result, not a strong or sweeping one, even with real random assignment behind it.
A smaller, more recent study points a similar direction. In 2026, researchers Cong Zhong and Wei Pan ran an 8-week randomized experiment with 67 preschoolers, ages 4 to 5, published in BMC Psychology. 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, using a four-part questionnaire that included a delay-of-gratification component. 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 behavioral test of a child actually choosing between two rewards. Treat it as a modest, early signal, not a settled finding.
A Longitudinal Study That Found a Real Effect, and Flagged Its Own Limits
One more study measured delay of gratification directly, with an actual behavioral task, and found a clearer effect. It just was not randomized.
Researchers Sarah Hennessy, Matthew Sachs, Beatriz Ilari, and Assal Habibi, at the University of Southern California, followed children from underserved communities starting around age 6 or 7. One group took part in community music training. A separate group did sports. A third did neither. Publishing in Frontiers in Neuroscience in 2019, the researchers reported that after three years, the music group was far more likely than the control group to choose a larger, delayed reward, such as saving up candy, over a smaller, immediate one. That gap was large by the usual statistical standard.
The researchers themselves were careful about what this study could and could not show. Families chose which program to enroll their child in. Nobody was randomly assigned. The authors wrote plainly that “children with inherent musical motivation persisted in the music training program,” and acknowledged pre-existing differences in home environment and parental motivation the study could not rule out. This is the same self-selection problem the Corrigall and Schellenberg studies describe, showing up again in a different research design.
What Practice Habits Actually Look Like
A separate line of research asks a more descriptive question: what do music students actually do while they practice, and does that change as they improve? This work is less about proving cause and effect, and more about describing self-regulation in action.
In a large 2012 study, Susan Hallam and six co-researchers surveyed 3,325 young musicians, from beginners to conservatoire students, about how they organized their practice. Students at higher skill levels reported more planning, more targeted work on trouble spots, and more deliberate integration of practiced sections into a full piece. Researchers consider this kind of planning and self-monitoring a form of self-regulated learning. The study describes what advanced students do. It does not, and does not claim to, prove that lessons caused this skill to develop, rather than more disciplined students simply being the ones who reached advanced levels.
A smaller, earlier study gets closer to the practice room itself. In 2008, researcher Amanda Leon-Guerrero videotaped 16 middle-school instrumentalists practicing a new piece, then reviewed the footage with each student to ask what strategy they had just used. Repetition came up more than any other strategy by far. This is a useful, close-up look at self-regulated practice in a young musician. With only 16 students and no comparison group, it 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 That Has Not Been Tested Here
Psychologist Angela Duckworth built a specific research framework around one word: grit, meaning sustained passion and perseverance toward a long-term goal. She and Patrick Quinn published the Short Grit Scale in 2009, a validated questionnaire now used across dozens of studies. Using that scale, grit has predicted GPA gains in teenagers, retention at the West Point military academy, and how far competitors advance at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
We could not find a peer-reviewed study that gives young music students the Grit Scale itself, under a controlled design, and tests whether years of lessons predict a higher grit score. The framework is well-validated in other settings. It has simply not, as far as we could verify, been rigorously applied to music training specifically. Anyone who tells you “research proves music lessons build grit,” citing Duckworth’s actual instrument, is going further than the published evidence supports. The closer, real evidence on this specific question is the delay-of-gratification and personality research described above.
What This All Adds Up To
A few things rest on real, verifiable ground. A genuine randomized trial in Venezuela found a small, borderline improvement in self-control after one year of music training, alongside a stronger benefit for one at-risk subgroup. A small randomized preschool study found a similar small benefit on a teacher-rated self-control scale. A longitudinal study using an actual delay-of-gratification task found a much larger effect, though its design could not rule out self-selection, and its own authors said so.
Other things point the other way. Two well-designed studies by Corrigall and Schellenberg found that personality traits, especially openness and conscientiousness, predict who takes lessons and for how long, at least as well as intelligence does. One of those studies 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-to-medium studies show real, modest self-control benefits from training, including one genuine randomized trial. Set against that is equally real evidence that conscientious, open, curious children and families are the ones who choose lessons to begin with, which runs some of the correlation backward from the popular claim. Both things can be true about the same children at once. Untangling exactly how much of each is at work is not fully possible with the studies that exist today.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do music lessons actually teach kids self-discipline?
The honest answer is partial. A real randomized trial in Venezuela found a small, borderline improvement in self-control after one year of orchestra training. A small randomized preschool study found a similar modest benefit. But separate research found that traits like conscientiousness and openness predict which children take music lessons in the first place, so some of what looks like a training effect may really be a selection effect.
Could it be that disciplined kids just choose music lessons, rather than lessons creating discipline?
Yes, and there is direct evidence for this. Two studies led by Kathleen Corrigall and E. Glenn Schellenberg found that a child’s personality, and a parent’s personality, predict how long a child sticks with lessons, sometimes better than IQ does. Researchers call this pattern niche-picking: curious, motivated families gravitate toward music lessons, rather than lessons manufacturing that curiosity from scratch.
What does the Venezuela study actually prove about music and self-control?
It is one of the only true randomized trials in this field. Researchers used a lottery-style admission process for a national youth orchestra program with 2,914 children. After one year, children offered a spot showed a small improvement in self-control and a small drop in behavior problems, both significant only at the loosest common statistical threshold. Most other measures showed no effect. It is real evidence of a small effect, not proof of a large one.
Is there solid research connecting music lessons to “grit,” specifically?
Not that we could find. Angela Duckworth’s Grit Scale is a well-validated tool, used in studies of spelling bee competitors and military cadets. We could not locate a study that gave young music students that scale under a controlled design and tested it against years of training. The closer, verified evidence on self-discipline in young musicians comes from the delay-of-gratification and personality studies above, not from the grit framework directly.
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, alongside 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 experience real, structured music instruction from 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.
SOURCES:
- Corrigall, K.A., Schellenberg, E.G., and Misura, N.M., “Music Training, Cognition, and Personality,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 4, 2013, article 222, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00222
- Corrigall, K.A., and Schellenberg, E.G., “Predicting Who Takes Music Lessons: Parent and Child Characteristics,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, 2015, article 282, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00282
- Lu, Y., Shi, L., and Musib, A.F., “Effects of Music Training on Executive Functions in Preschool Children Aged 3-6 Years: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, 2025, article 1522962, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1522962
- Aleman, X., Duryea, S., Guerra, N.G., McEwan, P.J., Munoz, R., Stampini, M., and Williamson, A.A., “The Effects of Musical Training on Child Development: A Randomized Trial of El Sistema in Venezuela,” Prevention Science, vol. 18, 2017, pp. 865-878, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-016-0727-3
- Zhong, C., and Pan, W., “Can Music Activity Training Improve Self-Control Among Preschool Children? Evidence from an 8-Week Intervention Experiment,” BMC Psychology, vol. 14, 2026, article 763, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-04534-1
- Hennessy, S.L., Sachs, M.E., Ilari, B., and Habibi, A., “Effects of Music Training on Inhibitory Control and Associated Neural Networks in School-Aged Children: A Longitudinal Study,” Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 13, 2019, article 1080, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2019.01080
- Hallam, S., Rinta, T., Varvarigou, M., Creech, A., Papageorgi, I., Gomes, T., and Lanipekun, J., “The Development of Practising Strategies in Young People,” Psychology of Music, vol. 40, no. 5, 2012, pp. 652-680, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735612443868
- Leon-Guerrero, A., “Self-Regulation Strategies Used by Student Musicians During Music Practice,” Music Education Research, vol. 10, no. 1, 2008, pp. 91-106, https://doi.org/10.1080/14613800701871439
- Duckworth, A.L., and Quinn, P.D., “Development and Validation of the Short Grit Scale (Grit-S),” Journal of Personality Assessment, vol. 91, no. 2, 2009, pp. 166-174, https://doi.org/10.1080/00223890802634290