Drama Games that have Saved me from Screaming at My Children
My children are blessed to have a care giver in their life who did fifteen years of drama growing up. Sometimes when we are at grid lock, they will do a random stage fall and everyone will be laughing, or they will point out the window and shout “THREE HEADED MONKEY! AHHH!!” and everyone will be thinking about what else we can imagine outside our window instead of about how annoyed we are with each other.
Redirecting — when you diffuse a difficult situation by shifting energy and focus to something else — is essential in parenting, but it is really hard to do when you are tired, cranky, or yourself upset. Redirecting takes creativity, and sometimes I run out of creativity.
Drama games are great for redirecting energy! And, because good acting has so much to do with emotions, they have the added benefit of helping children (and us adults) improve emotional awareness and intelligence without feeling like that’s what we are doing — because drama games are a lot of fun.
Here are five extremely simple drama games that can be helpful for diffusing an emotionally-charged moment with our quarantine-cranky kids:
- Bubbles: Try to say “bubbles” while looking and sounding angry. (seriously, try it)
- “I love you honey but I just can’t smile”: person 1 says “honey, do you love me?” and person 2 has to respond “I love you honey, but I just can’t smile.” Person 2 is not allowed to smile, and Person 1 tries to get them to without touching them.
- One word conversation: have a conversation using only one word. Like goldfish, pillow, cookie, or bath tub. It’s entirely up to you if you will let your kid choose the word “poop” for this game…
- Slow motion emotion: Choose an emotion and everyone slowly takes on that emotion while one person slowly counts to ten.
- Questions: Pick a scenario or even just a setting, and then improvise a scene using only questions. The link has some example scenes/settings.
And a bonus sixth example — bringing out tongue twisters can also be a great energy-shifter.
Drama games are an almost endless rabbit hole. Some of them seem like fun but require more steps than I can remember (like Bippity Bippity Bop — more power to you if you can remember this many details). Other good ones include Park Bench, Bus Stop, and Emotional Transfer.
Playing games like this is out of my comfort zone. I’m a boring former Economics prof, and definitely not an actor. But welcoming this sort of dramatic energy into our family has absolutely saved me from screaming at my kids multiple times in the last two weeks. That seems like an efficient use of resources, and so I have optimized to adopt this strategy (Economist joke).