I cried all the time before going to classes when I was a kid (six, seven). I used to cry in the car before going to my first piano lessons (this may be why I never learned piano), simply because I was going to a strange person's house. It is a fear of the unknown and the different. Also a piano is a very big instrument, you are propped up high, it is very scary, all those white teeth. I sometimes believed that I would never see my mother again, and that I would be left with this teacher. Winnicott, in his great book Playing and Reality talks about this -- the moment when your mother can leave you playing in a room, and you can accept that she will come back. Some children never fully get that confidence. Some people are just born with a few layers of skin too few. What always worked for me was food. It is hard to cry and eat at the same time.

yours, Peter T.