How Escape Rooms Can Help Build and Improve Relationships Between Parents and Child

Escape rooms are the latest up-and-coming activity to engage in for a fun hour or so. These days, activities like laser tag and escape rooms continue to gain popularity as passive activities slowly start to bore the newest generation. Anything sporty and fun, and demanding either physical or mental involvement, seems like an exciting way of spending your time, which is precisely where escape rooms come in.

There are many things that people automatically associate with the term ‘escape room’, primarily because of the word ‘escape’, which immediately triggers our adrenaline. The first thought that many of us might have about escape rooms would be- an exciting, thrilling adventure that you must go on with your friends. The constant demand for you to stay on your toes, think quickly and be open to new ideas certainly appeals to the newer generation.

What are escape rooms?

Escape rooms are small, closed rooms filled with puzzles and mysteries that you are expected to solve with a group of other people. With a central mystery to solve, you face various hurdles and problems, and all the answers are provided to you within the room. Looking for clues and solving these puzzles, you need to solve the mystery within the time given to you to win. The puzzles and riddles presented to you usually require common sense and general knowledge to solve, so prior preparation is not necessary.

How do escape rooms affect relationships?

While all this is true, there is a subtle but huge impact that these escape rooms have on our relationships with people in the room. The way we conduct ourselves in the room, our behavior towards others, how well we work together to solve the problems, and how successful we eventually are. All these factors ultimately decide how much you enjoy your experience, but they also determine the long-term relationship you share with the others in your group.

Solving escape room puzzles together while facing a time crunch requires the highest coordination from all parties, as most of these mysteries require multiple parties to act together. All enmity or hostility between the people tends to evaporate upon entering the room: it’s do (together) or die in there.

Why parents and children

As the world grows into its next generation, there has been a huge increase in the number of families that have both parents working and a single child alone at home. As seen very clearly, all this does is impair the parent-child relationship and sometimes even makes the child socially handicapped. Solitude is never desirable, especially when you spend the majority of your day alone.

And even when the family does get together, parents often run the risk of boring the child, be it movie nights with HBO or a game of Monopoly. The generation gap becomes evident once both parent and child start looking for a common interest that they can indulge in together.

For the parents looking for that one spark to connect with their children, this would be it. Escape rooms are a brilliant adventure, requiring the best of the abilities of both the youngsters and parents to solve the problems before the time runs out. The elder, more knowledgeable parents bring their understanding of different problems and experiences to the table, while the children are more likely to come up with novel ideas and solutions for the same.

Also, the requirement for both the parents and children to work together stems from the problems themselves. Many puzzles are present in two or more parts spread across the room and hence require cooperation. And we all know what cooperation builds better relationships and trust between people, exactly why families should look to escape rooms for building up the bond with their children.

Another great feature of these rooms is that they bring all the participants to a similar ground, facing a similar problem, and equipped with similar resources. Every fight or misunderstanding is left outside the room, and once you step inside the room, you are fully immersed, and no grudges make sense. People get a new ground to build their relationship upon, which gives them a chance to look at each other in a new light, unobstructed by past events.

The cases where the parents and children in question already share a good bond but usually don’t get to spend time together, an escape room is much better than watching a movie together or having a karaoke night. The problem-solving aspect of these escape rooms provides active participation, and often people require others’ help to solve problems. This builds up a good rapport and often leads to respect between both parties: which stands them both in good stead later on in life.