I have a quaker parrot that I've had for about a year now who's wings have always been clipped. My parents insist on always having his wings clipped and I'm afraid if I ever do manage to convince them to let his wings grow out he'll just fly everywhere since he hasn't been trained at an early age. He's very stubborn and it takes months to teach him simple things. ( It took half the year for me to teach him how to get up on my finger and he still struggles.) I don't know if it's my fault, but I'd
like to think about him being able to fly, I'm just worried about him hurting himself. (2/2)
Learning is dependent on the specific bird as well as the trainer, all animals learn at their own pace and there’s factors that affect that.  For teaching them to step up there’s a lot of fears they’re overcoming to get to the actual concept which is why such a simple thing can take so long.  They’re not only learning how to step up but they’re also learning how rewards work, how to trust you, and how to communicate with you.  Teaching step up is often the thing that takes the longest time for a lot of birds to learn, plenty of other things can be taught in less than a day sometimes! Â
Major factors are your ability to train (which more often than not is the problem!), if you’re slow on the clicker, not using a bridge device such as a clicker, slow to reward, not consistent with your rewards, not using something they want to work with, progressing too slow, or asking too much of them they can easily become confused or frustrated which makes training take a heck of a lot longer. How well you communicate determines how well they’re going to be able to learn.  The more you train the more aware of their body language you’ll be and the more you’ll learn how they learn best, also the more accustomed to training they’ll become and they’ll start to pick things up a bit quicker.  Learning in school for the first time is hard and you’ll spend weeks on the same subject but as you end up in high school or college you start learning new topics on a daily basis, same sort of concept applies here!
You can’t expect a bird to know how to communicate with you and learn from day one, if you’re wanting him to learn it’s on you to take the time to set up training sessions daily, listen to his body language and see what motivates him to learn.  The more consistent you are and the more you practice the more you’ll both learn to communicate better and the faster they can start picking up on tricks and commands.  The training page (which may not be accessible on mobile) goes over how to set up for a good training session and lists a few tricks and things to work on, highly recommend target training first.
From what I’ve worked with birds really don’t just fly everywhere, they fly where it’s fun to do so, sometimes this is a high place, some times this is at people because people are fun.  Easiest way to get them to not fly where you don’t want them to? Make somewhere they can be more fun than where they want to be! This post sort of goes over that concept a little bit more and as I more recently mentioned there are a lot of ways to teach birds to stay or turn around on command.  Training them to work with people is a lot healthier and safer for them than just clipping them for compliance, more often than not being clipped causes injuries.  Severe clips can break keel bones and ‘proper’ clips stop birds from being able to adequately turn or stop to get themselves away from hazards, being flighted avoids those problems.  There’s a whole rant here on how much healthier and safer being flighted is for birds that goes in to far more detail around the neurology behind it as well as the effects of being flighted on their respiratory and circulatory systems.
Whether or not a bird is flighted is not something I can change but do know that being clipped is not the solution to problems you’re worried about! Without training, clipped or not, both birds are still at risk of all the same hazards.
