![]() As studies have shown, parental mirroring helps babies’ brains develop. It can be a great way to break the tension when your child needs attention. “My kids love it because I’m so focused on them,” Burns said. This helps give your child a sense of agency by removing or reversing the usual power dynamic - you’re sometimes following them, rather than the other way around. ![]() You sit or stand across from your child, make deep eye contact, and do the same thing they’re doing, from facial expressions to hand motions. For parents, she suggested starting with mirroring, a beginners’ technique taken straight from her classes. ![]() “It’s just a shift in your brain, and I think that anyone can teach themselves to listen this way,” said Lauren Burns, a performer and instructor with the Los Angeles-based improv theater and school, The Groundlings. “You’re trying to be truthful, and that’s what’s funny.” “You’re not onstage, trying to be funny,” said Damian Synadinos, an author-illustrator of a children’s book about improv. But the original idea wasn’t about being funny, it was about being truthful - in fact, many improv games originated with ones taught to immigrant kids at the Jane Addams Hull-House in Chicago. If you’ve been to an improv show, you expect to laugh. But improv is more than just a cure for boredom - it can be a way of parenting, one that can help us be more patient and attentive with our kids, and help them be more resilient and open with us. And I owed it all to improv - a form of comedy you likely know from shows like “Whose Line Is It Anyway?,” in which performers riff on a premise the way jazz musicians riff on a melody, following rules they have agreed on in advance. It would be premature to say I had won the war on boredom, but I had emerged victorious in battle. ![]() It lasted only two minutes or so, but we had lightened the mood together, and soon she was running off to play with her brother. She suggested new ways I could move or talk. I informed her that I was now a robot, and that she could push my “buttons” (on my chest) and see what happened. Thinking fast, I summoned up an improv game I had recently learned. Eleven months into quarantine, when her days are spent in a corner of our house with a school-issued iPad and even the new toys from Santa are exhausted from countless afternoons with them, well … it was a little boring. One recent afternoon, my 6-year-old daughter declared she was bored. ![]()
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