Be her bandmate, not her guitar teacher

Quick answer: Keep sessions to ten minutes. Let her choose the first song. Teach four chords and no theory. Play next to her instead of standing over her, and let her catch you getting something wrong.

Ten minutes is the whole session. When the timer goes off, you stop, even if she's on a roll. Especially if she's on a roll. You want her walking away wanting more, and no kid ever begged for more of something that ran forty-five minutes past the fun.

Stop being the teacher

The fastest way to kill a nine-year-old's interest in guitar is to say, "Okay, sit up straight, let's go over the parts of the guitar." You mean well. She hears school.

You're not her instructor. You're the guy in the band who's a little further along. That's a different job. An instructor corrects. A bandmate says "play that part again, I liked it."

Say the encouraging thing first and the correction second, if at all. For the first month, skip the correction unless a habit will hurt her, like a death grip on the neck that tires her hand. Everything else can wait. Her posture will sort itself out. Her interest, once lost, won't.

Start with the right guitar

A full-size acoustic with thick strings is a rough place to start for a small kid. Her fingertips will hurt, and the guitar will feel like furniture in her arms. Get a smaller-bodied guitar sized to her, and ask the shop to set it up with light strings. Nylon strings are gentler on young fingers, and plenty of players start there. If she's closer to teenage size, a standard acoustic with a good setup is fine. Our piece on what matters when you buy your first acoustic covers the buying side, and most of it applies to her.

Warn her about the sore fingertips. Say it flat out: "Your fingers will hurt for a couple of weeks, then they'll toughen up. Everybody goes through it." Kids can handle a hard thing when somebody tells them the truth about it. They can't handle being surprised.

Let her pick the song

This is the part that makes or breaks it. If you pick "Wildwood Flower" because it's a classic and she's lukewarm on it, you've assigned homework. If she picks something she already sings in the car, she's practicing without knowing it.

Here's the trick. A huge number of songs she likes run on the same four chords: G, Em, C and D. Learn those and you can play "Take Me Home, Country Roads," "Stand By Me" and "You Are My Sunshine" (that last one only needs G, C and D). Sit with her and find out which song she wants. Look up the chords together. If it needs a chord that's too hard, use a capo or pick a different song. Don't tell her she's not ready.

Her pick can surprise you. Maybe it's Dolly Parton's "Jolene," or something off the radio you've never heard. Play it anyway. You'll learn something, and she'll notice you cared enough to try.

Play next to her, not at her

Put the guitars side by side. Sit on the couch, the porch steps, the tailgate. Don't sit across a table like it's a parent-teacher conference.

Then split the work:

• You strum slow, plain down-strums on the beat. She changes chords.
• Switch. She strums, you change.
• Have her pick one note per beat while you hold the chords.

The first time the two of you get through a verse without stopping, she'll grin like she just hit a homer. Let her. Don't say "now let's work on your rhythm."

And be a bad student on purpose now and then. Ask her to show you how she's holding the D chord. Get the fingering wrong and let her fix you. A girl who gets to teach her dad a chord will practice that chord for a week.

What goes wrong, and what to do

Week three. The thrill's gone, the fingers still hurt, and the songs sound nothing like the record. Almost every beginner hits this wall. Don't lecture. Shorten the session to five minutes and play something she already knows cold. Missing the wall isn't the goal. Getting over it is.

The F chord. It's brutal, it's not required, and it's the place a lot of kids quit. Skip it for the first couple months. Plenty of good songs don't need it.

Your own impatience. You'll want to jump in and fix her grip. Sit on your hands. It's her guitar, and her learning pace is the only pace that counts.

The little brother. Any sibling with a loud opinion about her playing gets one warning, then leaves the room. A kid learning something new needs a safe place to be bad at it. You're allowed to hold that line.

The skipped days. Don't nag. Leave the guitar on a stand in the living room, not in a case in the closet. A guitar she can see is a guitar she'll pick up on a boring afternoon. If she skips a week, play something yourself in the next room and see who wanders in.

Give her something to play for

Practice for no audience wears thin quickly. Give her one. Sunday dinner works, or Grandma on the phone, or the family on the back porch after supper. One song, four chords, whatever speed she can manage. A clean version of "You Are My Sunshine" for her grandfather is worth more than a month of drills.

Show her where she fits in the larger story, too. She isn't a girl dabbling in a boys' hobby. Women built country music from the start. Maybelle Carter's thumb-and-finger guitar style shaped how people play to this day, and our piece on the women who built country music gives you a starting list to play for her. Put on a record and let her hear it.

Know when to hand her off

Some daughters take off, and then you'll be out of your depth in a year. That's good news. A local teacher who knows more than you can take her further, and you can stay in the role you do best: driving her there, listening to what she's working on, and showing up when she plays. Pass her along without hard feelings. Lessons from a stranger and songs with Dad aren't in competition.

If she wants to quit, set a finish line. "Let's go through the end of the month, then it's your call." That teaches her to give a thing a fair try before dropping it, and it keeps you from nagging forever.

Keep the same rules you'd keep for anything borrowed or shared. Teach her to wipe down the strings after she plays and to put the guitar back where it lives. Tune it before she picks it up, so the first thing she hears is a guitar that sounds right. Leave it a little better than she found it.

You can use our twelve-minute routine as a template too. The principle is the same at any age: short, steady and low-pressure beats long and tense.

Years from now she may not remember what a D chord looks like. She'll remember you sitting on the floor next to her, laughing at how bad you were at the F.