Want to keep your kids happy? Use humor

Even after doing your best as a parent, do you still find your child going to bed cranky or feeling disconnected? If you’ve ever wondered what might be missing in your relationship with your child, experts have a surprisingly simple answer: humor.

Yes, that’s right. A new study suggests that laughter is not only the best medicine, but also a greatparenting tool. According to a study led by researchers from Penn State, humor is an effective parenting tool. They found that a parent or caregiver’s use of humor affected the quality of their relationship with their children. They found that 71.8% of participants in the study viewed humor as an effective parenting strategy. Over half reported that their parents used humor during their childhood, and the majority of those individuals planned to incorporate humor into their own parenting. The findings are published in the journal PLOS One.

“Humor can teach people cognitive flexibility, relieve stress, and promote creative problem solving and resilience. My father used humor and it was very effective. I use humor in my clinical practice and with my own children. The question became, how does one constructively use humor?” Benjamin Levi, professor of pediatrics and humanities at Penn State College of Medicine and senior author of the study, said in a statement.

The researchers noted that while aspects of humor and play have been studied across various settings and in child development, the use of humor in parenting hasn’t been formally studied. “There’s an interesting parallel between business and parenting, which are both hierarchical. In business, humor has been shown to help reduce hierarchies, create better environments for collaboration and creativity and diffuse tension,” first author Lucy Emery, who was a medical student at Penn State College of Medicine at the time of the research and currently a pediatrics resident at Boston Children’s Hospital said.

“While parent-child relationships are more loving than business relationships, stressful situations happen a lot when parenting. Humor can help diffuse that tension and hierarchy and help both parties feel better about a stressful situation,” Emery added.

This research was an initial step to examine how people view the relationship between humor, their experience being parented and their experience of parenting.

The study could help understand how humor can be used constructively and the kinds of situations that are riskier for using humor.

To understand the link between humor and parenting, they surveyed 312 people between the ages of 18 and 45. More than half of the participants said they were raised by people who used humor and 71.8% agreed that humor can be an effective parenting tool. The majority of them said that they also plan or use humor to deal with their children.

Among participants whose parents used humor, 50.5% reported a good relationship with their parents, and 44.2% felt their parents did a good job raising them.

In contrast, only 2.9% of those whose parents did not use humor reported a good relationship, and just 3.6% believed their parents excelled at parenting.“My hope is that people can learn to use humor as an effective parenting tool, not only to diffuse tension but develop resilience and cognitive and emotional flexibility in themselves and model it for their children,” Levi said.