Listen to your kids in the escape room
Before one decides to become a escape room owner, they start out as escape room enthusiasts.
Long before we dreamed up opening Locktopia Houston, we played several other escape rooms as a family.
On two different occasions, when we asked for a clue, the response was, “listen to your son.”
Our ten your old son had been desperately trying to tell us the answer and we ignored him.
The very next time we solved a room together, I did it again. When we asked for a clue, the game master told us to “listen to your son.”
How did we ignore him twice?
Now that we are on the other side of the screen, I see now that we aren’t the only family that fails to take the suggestions of its younger members.
Even in the short amount of time we have been open, I have been tempted to give the hint “listen to your kid,” when a family is stuck on a clue.
Why do we ignore them?
Well, for starters, as parents we often think we know more than them. We are forgetting that escape rooms are a ton of fun, but they can also be high stress scenarios.
You are doing something you have never done before, you don’t know all the rules exactly, and you have a time limit. What is NOT stressful about that?
As the game master, I know all of the answers to the room and it’s always fascinating to see the light bulb go on in a kid’s eyes when they figure out a piece to the puzzle.
I also watch them fumble to get the attention of the adults in the room and find the words to communicate what they just figured out.
We often discount that they think differently than we do.
Then there are times that they get the puzzle, or the solution to what it is, and then get distracted by someone else’s idea in the room before they can get enough words out for their family group to even realize that they had an answer.
So, my advice to you, before you ask the game master for a clue in an escape room, make sure to ask the kid(s) in the room if they have an idea, and then you might have to follow a pointed finger, and try to walk them through what they are trying to get out.
They might surprise you, or maybe not, because you knew your child(ren) was/were awesome anyway!
