Encouraging your child to participate in theatre and embrace the dramatic arts can bring about many benefits for your child.
By offering a fun and creative outlet, this extra-curricular activity teaches and develops skills that can aid your child throughout their lives and into adulthood.
Sometimes these benefits can be overlooked. Theatre can aid, and offer a wealth of benefits to children such as confidence building, physical communication, improved memory and teamwork.
An important aspect of theatre is teaching and encouraging children to learn and embody other personas. As part of this, through acting and even spectating, children can see and understand different emotions, as they must understand emotions to fully embrace and capture how a character feels.
This skill allows them to be able to portray their characterization with conviction. It will enable them to develop and expand their own personal emotional intelligence.
Only with this skill development can they grow into empathetic adults aware of others’ feelings and the emotions that may surge throughout their social interactions.
Empathy is a skill that is utilized within daily living. It is a skill that needs to be taught and developed. It is also a skill that children do not have naturally.
Children naturally can find it challenging to understand and place themselves in someone else’s shoes and consider a viewpoint that isn’t their own. Instinctively, they only think about how they feel and what they want. Participating in theatre allows them to start learning and developing empathy through characterization.
For a character to become believable and accurately portrayed, your child needs to fully embrace and understand the character and their individual situation. This can only be achieved by stepping into their shoes. By taking steps to understand their life, history, how they got to be in their current circumstance and the decisions they have made, they can depict the character to their fullest.
Only once your child can understand the character can they apply this insight into how they carry themselves throughout their own day-to-day life and consider how to react to citations and other people efficiently.
The more exposure a child gets to a wide range of experiences, emotions and thoughts, the more they can build on their own empathetic skills, which are transferable to everyday situations. In other words, this can affect how they effectively deal with you, their peers, other adults, school and it can even follow them into adulthood when they are applying for their future career or have their own children.
Supporting your child to delve deeply into their character by discussing the scenes, the emotions and what drives these reactions will heighten and nurture your child’s empathy.
Throughout life, there are times when you need to be able to stand up in front of a crowd and speak.
This is not something that everyone is comfortable doing or that comes easily. This is particularly true for children, especially those that may be naturally shy.
Having your child participate in theatre and perform in front of an audience teaches your child to build up their confidence, become assertive and learn how to seize the confidence to put themselves out there in situations where they may forget their words or risk making a mistake. It will teach them to have confidence in their own skills.
Through learning how to become genuinely confident within their own skin, your child can learn to adapt and embrace situations which put a focused attention on them.
The confidence gained from theatre naturally transfers itself into many different aspects of daily life throughout childhood and into the rest of their lives. For instance, this confidence can translate into encouraging and giving your child the tools to become confident enough to speak out in school, answer questions and participate wholeheartedly in-class projects. It can allow them to stand in front of an audience confidently and deliver lines, give presentations or even teach others.
As your child gets older, this will convert into having the confidence to apply for jobs, carry themselves and comfortably showcase their own skills when going through interview processes or promotions.
In addition to the 3 reasons noted above, an even more comprehensive range of benefits demonstrates how theatre can benefit children:
This extra-curricular activity offers such a variety of benefits, plus the ability to provide a hobby and passion that could shape your child’s future. You can see why it is vital that theatre and performing arts are offered as part of the curriculum and drama clubs run.
Not all parents have the financial means of being able to support private funding to allow their child to gain these skills. However, with schools proving this, children of all backgrounds will not be penalized and can gain skills that can aid them throughout the years to come.