How Acting Can Help Your Child Grow

Not only is acting a fun, creative, and educational experience, but it can also help your child in their development!

It can be difficult to find fun activities for your kids that help them grow and develop. Many activities these days have become overly competitive and stressful for kids. But acting remains a healthy, fun, and accessible activity for kids. Acting is also used in many therapeutic techniques and has been shown to be very effective in helping kids grow. While your kid doesn’t need to become a professional actor to grow up, adding some acting as an extracurricular activity can help them as they navigate their development. 

Children Who Act Build Perseverance and Confidence 

Taking on a role is a very powerful tool, as the research shows.

In a number of recent studies, playing a character has been shown to increase children's ability to persevere through challenges. In a patience task, where children were told to either take an instant reward or wait for a short time for an even bigger reward, children who wore a Superman cape and were told to impersonate the hero were significantly more patient. Psychologist Rachel White’s work has shown that pretending to be Batman substantially increased how long children were willing to persevere on a challenging and repetitive task and improved their mental functioning, such as increasing their control over their actions.  

In particular, children do best when portraying a character who is seen as an example for behavior: someone heroic, strong, and larger than life. In psychology, this is called an exemplar. When kids feel that they are powerful, competent, and skilled, they behave that way and push themselves to be like their heroes. For kids, the world can be a pretty intimidating place; they need to continually manage themselves, interact with others, and learn about what’s going on around them (Honestly, this can be intimidating for adults!). But when children are given the opportunity to feel like someone powerful, it becomes easier to face the challenges around them, which helps speed up their development. 

But will this actually help your kid when they really need it? If they have to put on a cape every time they deal with a challenge, that’s not super helpful. But this type of activity isn’t so much a problem-solving strategy; it's more of a learning opportunity. The boost provided by playing a character can strengthen neurons related to persistence, patience, and self-control, and it can show children the potential benefits of these behaviors, which motivates children to use them in the future.  

Acting Helps Kids Understand The Emotions of Others

Being aware of character’s emotions is a key part of acting.

It may seem obvious that acting helps you understand other’s emotions. Playing a role effectively involves stepping into someone else’s shoes and feeling what they are feeling. When acting, kids must imagine what their character would be feeling in a situation to be able to express it outwardly for audiences to see. This practice helps kids build the critical skill of empathy (for a whole article about empathy, see here!), which helps them to have high quality and healthy relationships.

Acting also offers kids a chance to practice social interactions in a safe space. Especially for kids with social struggles from conditions like autism or anxiety, acting offers a comfortable place to practice and rehearse without the free-reign (or the pressure!) of the real world. When acting, kids get to work through structured conversations; this practice can help them engage in conversation in the real world. This is especially true for improvisational acting. Because it requires you to be quick on your feet and creative in your responses, improv has been shown to not only improve kids’ creativity, but also help with increasing social competence. Through improvisational acting, kids get low-stakes practice dealing with unpredictable social situations that enhance their mental flexibility and their social skills, which helps them make (and keep) friends.  Improvisational acting is much more applicable to real-world social interactions than scripted acting because real interactions are unpredictable. For kids who struggle with social interactions, improv can be a safe and fun way to work on their social fluidity, when the worst-case scenario is a botched scene you leave behind when you start the next one. 

Acting Helps Kids Understand Their Own Emotions

Acting helps kids take a step back from their own emotions to look at them from a distance.

In addition to understanding other’s emotions, acting helps you understand your own emotions. When playing a character, there is a distance created that separates you from emotions. Essentially, you are given the opportunity to look at emotions and analyze them rather than simply experiencing them. When playing a character, you need to ask yourself what emotions they would be feeling and then analyze how those emotions typically live in you, in terms of feeling, behavior, and expression, to better portray the character. This allows kids to take deep, complex looks into emotions through a fun, expressive activity rather than intensive introspection. 

In psychology, this distance from emotions is called cognitive defusion. Cognitive defusion is critical in the treatment of many disorders, and it serves as a protective factor against a number of problems. It is so important because it allows you to look at your emotions without necessarily getting wrapped up in them. This is what allows us to react in the way that we want, instead of being controlled by our emotions. Many therapists refer to it as looking at our emotions, not through them. While the defusion that comes with acting won’t be as strong as it might be in therapy, it is still the beginning of a helpful practice.  

For kids, this is especially important, as they typically have strong, volatile emotions. One of the biggest skills needed as kids grow up is the ability to handle their emotions without getting caught up in them. Those of us that work with children have all had interactions where a kid’s emotions seem far out of proportion to the situation, and they struggle to control themselves. With increased cognitive defusion, kids become  more likely to examine their emotions and behaviors, which gives them increased self-control and reduces the distress from negative emotions. 

The distance that playing a character affords also enables kids to approach difficult emotions more easily. Unpleasant emotions like anger and anxiety are usually difficult to think about, because we start feeling them when we think about them, so we tend to avoid them. This is especially true for kids, who easily form habits of avoiding complex emotions. Cognitive behavioral therapy shows us that every time an emotion is avoided, it becomes more severe and uncomfortable the next time it comes around. In this way, avoidance becomes cyclical, getting worse over time (for more info on the avoidance cycle, see here). When acting, kids can approach these scary emotions in a comfortable and safe environment, which breaks the cycle of avoidance.  

Because improv is unpredictable, is has also been shown to help children feel, understand, and accept the difficult emotions of anxiety and uncertainty in a fun and engaging environment. There is a natural anxiety created during improv as you anticipate your partners’ moves, but dealing with this anxiety in an improv setting allows kids to better deal with it in the real world. Improv also forces you to remain flexible and able to adapt to what occurs around you rather than too attached to one emotion or idea. Mental flexibility has been shown to be key to both resilience in the face of challenges and general life happiness, and improv is a great way to develop it.  

How To Get Your Child Into Acting

Role playing games are a great tool that uses acting to build emotional intelligence and social-emotional skills.

So what kind of activities can give kids opportunities to reap the benefits that come from acting? For many kids, being thrust into a play would be pretty overwhelming, especially with no prior experience. We’ve found that a good, easy alternative is role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. In tabletop role playing games, everyone plays a character of their own creation, which  gives them a chance to create their own exemplar that best fits them. If kids need more bravery, they can create a strong soldier willing to run into any battle. If kids need confidence, they can create a charming rogue who can use his words to get into or out of any situation. These characters work together, which increases engagement and social interaction. Plays improvise complex character dynamics with other players that help with empathy, mental flexibility, and social skills. But most importantly, it’s fun! Millions of players worldwide play D&D, enjoying its depth and endless replayability. It is a wonderful opportunity to meet new people to play and grow with.  

At Young Dragonslayers, we host groups playing collaborative tabletop roleplaying games led by skilled adult facilitators. We run sessions with the goal of guiding social interactions and discussions to build friendships and develop social-emotional skills through gaming. Because of our backgrounds in therapy and education, we’re dedicated to making sure every player finds the group that’s a perfect fit for them. We’ll assess their support needs, social skills, age, and gameplay preferences (some kids need to follow every rule, while others just want to blow up the dragon!) and create small groups matched with professional, experienced adults who are equipped to fit the needs of the group. Every child is placed in a group that can maximize their potential to grow in a safe and supportive environment. If you’d like to meet with us to discuss participating in these groups, sign up for our waitlist and we’ll connect with you!