The Effects of Role Playing

When done properly, we can understand the concepts demonstrated in role playing.  In class this week, we had three students act as a family unit: mother, father, and daughter.  We also had our teacher, Brother Williams, act as the marriage counselor.  We watched them role play as a family unit who had been dealing with their daughter suffering from bad fits of asthma.  We learned that instead of letting one parent take care of a situation (in this case, the mother being the one who usually calms the daughter when she was suffering an asthma attack), when both parents worked together as a unit, the daughter felt safer and had less frequent asthma attacks.  I think it is an interesting concept that children have the ability to sense a strain or a stronger bond between the parents having an effect on the environment, becoming less stressful and more safe.  In this scenario,  the parents loved each other and had a good relationship, but because they were separating responsibilities as parents and not necessarily working together, there was a disconnect in the family structure that they could not identify on their own in regards to what was causing the frequent asthma attacks.  Role playing in the classroom environment helped me to understand the importance of changing the family's habits instead of changing one family members habits.  When the family works together to fix a problem, the effects are greater and last much longer, where as, changing one family member's habits only lasts for so long before they revert back into their old habits.