Five Reasons Every Child Should Take an Acting Class

Often when I speak on a panel, there is that one overly ambitious parent who raises their hand and asks how they can set their child up for success, or make their child ‘more like me’.  While I sit there contemplating which of the countless life lessons I’ve learned so far to share with a room full of people, my answer is usually some iteration of ‘put your child in an acting class.’  Out of everything that I could have possibly said, I’m sure that this is one of the last things that eager parents of current or future Ivy League students would expect to come out of my mouth.  Following my response, they usually look at me like I have five heads as they begin contemplating if I very well might be as crazy as I seem.

Yet every time I give a student or a parent this piece of advice, I stand by the fact that I think that the skill set that one develops through acting truly holds the potential to set an individual up for both personal and professional success.  After growing up doing TV voiceover work and performing in a series of plays and musicals, I continued to study acting from a more academic perspective in both high school and while at Princeton.  Acting has always been the one outlet where I feel like I can completely let myself go, and quite literally walk in someone else’s shoes.  Yet, it wasn’t until recently that I realized just how important my many years of training in acting have been in setting me up for personal and professional success. 

With that said, I think that no matter whether or not a child has any intention of pursuing acting on a serious level, every child should take at least one acting class before they reach adulthood.  Here are five of the reasons why:

1. You will get significantly better at reading people.  When you walk into a scene, you quickly need to figure out the relationship between the characters on stage, and find your place in the organizational hierarchy.  Understanding how to read people in a matter of seconds through picking up external cues is a key skill in the business world, from reading a manager in a meeting, to getting through the interview process for a job, or seeing just how far you can push a client before they reach the tipping point.

2. You will understand how to control your reactions.  Many directors will tell you that the hardest part of acting is not acting, but rather reacting.  While the audience often overlooks the importance of reactions in the progression of a plot line, reactions are the key to linking nonsensical pieces of dialogue together and building meaning.  Being able to control your reactions – from language, to tone, to body expression – is incredibly important in the workplace, as you are often caught off guard and forced to react properly even when your sympathetic nervous system is going crazy.

3. You will learn how to improvise.  While various aspects of a scene are rehearsed, one of the most important skills that an actor will learn is how to go ‘off-book’ and be so overtly aware of the smallest movements of the characters that they are interacting with, that they can instantaneously jump in and deviate if something goes wrong or is not as rehearsed.  Very often in business, we are caught off guard – maybe a potential investor brings up a competitor that we’ve never heard of or the customer asks you for a particular functionality that you had never even thought of building – and you have nothing left to do but to go off-book, to improvise. Through learning how to be quick on your feet and adjust to any situation, you will feel confident in your ability to handle yourself under pressure and thrive in the most challenging of situations.

4. You will start analyzing speech and body language on a more detailed level.  When you first begin studying acting, it will likely seem absurd that you will need to break apart text and craft your movements at such a detailed level of precision.  Through acting, you will learn to gain full control of your body and voice, and also learn how to analyze the movements and speech of others. By understanding how to read between the lines of people’s words and actions in a professional setting, this will give you greater insight into the situation.

5. You will learn to develop a clear objective and formulate multiple tactics in attempt to reach your objective.  When you first come to analyze a new scene in acting, one of the primary drivers of the work that you will do as a character will be your objective in the scene - what it is that you want to try to get from the other characters that shapes how you approach your dialogue and blocking.  Once you have a clear objective in a scene, you will learn to come up with a series of tactics or potential approaches that you will try to take in order to achieve your objective.  If one doesn’t work, you have to move on to the next one.  The ability to identify a clear objective and formulate tactics is extremely helpful in business, as it will allow you to maintain a laser focus and understand how to quickly move from one approach to another if your original tactic is not working as you planned.

Beyond the five core skills that you can expect to learn above, taking an acting class is important on a macro level because it teaches children how to open up, take risks, and express themselves at a young age.  While consistency and self-understanding is incredibly important, acting will teach you how to accent or highlight different parts of yourself in different situations, which is crucial in helping you to quickly adapt to the many challenges that we are confronted with along the way.