Role Playing for Parents and Teens

What is Role Playing?

Role playing is a technique that is widely used as a conditioning or learning therapy to help teens who are suffering from problems like pressure to use drugs or engage in other dangerous behaviors deal with these situations in a better and responsible manner.

Types of Role Plays to Do

Below are a few role – playing scenarios that thousands of teenagers face every day. Parents and teens can read these together, get into characters and act them out.

Drunk Driver – You are in a party with a friend who is responsible to drop you home. However, you realize that the said friend is high on drugs or very drunk. Even then she is pressuring you to let her drive and drop you home. Your gut tells you that getting in that car is very risky; however you do not want to create a scene. What will you say?

You can reply:

• Let me drive, I am sober
• Let me just go and look for someone who is going our way and is not drinking, he could give us a ride
• Just get out of the car, you are too drunk. Let us take a walk and talk we can figure out how to get home later.

Medicine Cabinet – Your friend is at your place and she is insisting you to steal cough medication from your parent’s medicine cabinet. She says, “ No one will notice,” What will you say? You can reply:

• Believe me, my parents Will notice. They always warn me that they keep an eye on the medicine cabinet
• The taste of cough syrup is disgusting and I can’t stand it
• Not a good idea because taking a lot of it will make you throw up

How Role Playing will help your Teen from Abusing Drugs

Role playing involves creating certain situations that occur almost daily in the life of your teen and some of these are potentially dangerous like the party scene. These role playing activities help your teen get ready in advance for a situation like this and act in the best manner possible. Moreover, they also help teens and parents talk about teen drug abuse that is often a hard to discuss subject.