Yes, and … Clean Your Room

One recent afternoon, my 6-year-old daughter declared she was bored. These days, this is pretty common. 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.

Thinking fast, I summoned up an improv game I had recently learned. I informed her that I was now a robot, and that she could push my “buttons” (on my chest) and see what happened. With every press, I flung out an arm. Or made a robot sound. (“Beep boop.”) She laughed. She suggested new ways I could move or talk. 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.

It would be premature to say I had won the war on boredom, but I had emerged victorious in battle. 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. 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.

You don’t have to be funny.

If you’ve been to an improv show, you expect to laugh. 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. “You’re not onstage, trying to be funny,” said Damian Synadinos, an author-illustrator of a children’s book about improv. “You’re trying to be truthful, and that’s what’s funny.”

“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. For parents, she suggested starting with mirroring, a beginners’ technique taken straight from her classes. 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. 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.

“My kids love it because I’m so focused on them,” Burns said. It can be a great way to break the tension when your child needs attention. And you can start early. As studies have shown, parental mirroring helps babies’ brains develop.

Listen with your whole self.

As Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish wrote in their classic parenting book, “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk,” “Sometimes a sympathetic silence is all a child needs.” While Faber and Mazlish never dabbled in improv, their words suggest a parallel between kids and performers — a comic expects an audience’s rapt attention (if not always silence). And your child covets yours as well.

“Listening is very important in improvisation,” Synadinos said. “And that doesn’t just mean listening to the words that somebody’s saying, but listening to their body language and listening to their facial expressions, and listening to the tone and the speed of their voice — full body, complete listening.”

This might be easier said than done when you have emails to answer, projects to get through and remote learning to supervise. But taking a moment to be still and listen can help you bond with your child, and create a safe space for both play and more meaningful conversations.

For instance, Burns’s 6-year-old son would get anxious about putting on his shoes and pretend there was sand in them. So Burns asked him how the sand felt, how it got there and gradually calmed him down.

In our house, we recently started playing improv word games in place of having the television on during dinner. It was hard at first, but now, instead of mourning the loss of “Paw Patrol,” the kids get to goof around with their parents’ full attention.

Learn how to “Yes, and …”

Probably the best-known improv technique is called “Yes, and.” The idea is that, in a given scene, you run with any absurdities or accidents that happen by saying “Yes, and … ” The easiest place to use that is when you’re playing pretend with your children. Instead of dismissing your child’s premise, or nit-picking her execution — “Don’t put that sock popsicle in your mouth!” — run with it. Ask what flavor the sock popsicle is. Ask what else the sock popsicle store sells. Mitten cookies, maybe?

Their answers will almost certainly be weirder than yours. When your kiddo inevitably goes gross — Booger pudding! Snot cookies made with farts! — consider it license to do the same. (No judgments here.)

In fact, you could look at all of parenting as one long improvisation, said Rory Scovel, the comic and host of “Dads: The Podcast,” who trained in improv early in his career. He realized early on that, just as in improv, all you can control is the process, not the outcome.

This can also help with everyday tasks like getting out the door. Need to get teeth brushed ASAP? Pretend there’s a monster coming and the only way to ward him off is with clean teeth! In my experience, this takes less time than having a power struggle over the task at hand.

Embrace the beautiful oops.

There’s a children’s book by Barney Saltzberg called “Beautiful Oops!,” about how mistakes — a smudge, a torn piece of paper — can be beautiful on their own. It teaches kids resilience, and a similar concept governs improv. When a troupe member misspeaks, for example, the other members will repeat that mistake, as if part of the game. Burns said this is an important part of an improv mind-set. “In improv, mistakes are gifts,” she said. “Mistakes change our reality. And in improv we stop and explore the new reality.”

In parenting, the beautiful oops is often your child’s. My preschool son rather hilariously mispronounces the name of one of his friends as “potato,” so of course the whole family does now. But parents have “beautiful oops” moments, too. Imagine spilling a cup of coffee, said Keren Gudeman, the founder of Improv Parenting in Minneapolis. Most of us respond by cursing or getting annoyed, but she tries to control her response, either by trying “to somehow make it funny and fun.” By making a game or joke of it — blaming angry ghosts for clumsy accidents — you can demonstrate resilience and self-forgiveness. “Modeling for your kids like that is so powerful, because they do see us as infallible,” she said. When “we acknowledge mistakes as part of being human, what a beautiful lesson.”

Make a game of it.

Improv games can be a wonderful time-killer, whether you’re on a long car trip, stuck indoors on a snow day, or just on month 11 of a seemingly endless pandemic.

“If you want your children to grow up to be critical thinkers and have a mind of their own, you need to give them opportunities to be free,” said Aretha Sills, an improv teacher and associate director of Sills/Spolin Theater Works, based in Los Angeles. Her father co-founded The Second City, the Chicago improv theater and school whose alumni include Bill Murray, Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert.

Your options for improv games are limitless. Burns recommended one called “Circle Morph” (or “Throw Your Face” or “Pass the Emotion”), which is like the game of telephone but for facial expressions. You make a face at the person to your right, and that person tries to re-create it for the person on their right, and on it goes until it’s full circle. If it’s just you and your child, you can do “Alphabet” — a game where you take turns saying sentences that start with subsequent letters of the alphabet. (“Abby the Aardvark is interested in an adventure!” “Boy, that sounds like fun!” “Can we bring llamas?” “Darn right we can.”)

These games come in handy as a bit of pattern disruption — when your child is upset or stalling or, yes, bored. Not long after playing robot with my daughter, my son picked up on the game with a ridiculous 3-year-old version of a sci-fi cyborg voice. Kids are natural improvisers, and he quickly “Yes, and”-ed himself into a dancing robot, a cleaning robot, and then a sister-chasing robot. He continued the game at bedtime until we pressed his shirt gently, pretending to have found his power button. And … scene.

Paul L. Underwood is writes frequently on health and culture for national publications. He’s the father to two young children in Austin, Texas.