Parents who use humor have better relationships with their children, study finds

They say that laughter is the best medicine, but it could be a good parenting tool too, according to a new study led by researchers from Penn State.

In a pilot study, the research team found that most people viewed humor as an effective parenting tool and that a parent or caregiver's use of humor affected the quality of their relationship with their children. Among those whose parents used humor, the majority viewed their relationship with their parents and the way they were parented in a positive light. The researchers published their findings in the journal PLOS One.

"Humor can teach people cognitive flexibility, relieve stress, and promote creative problem solving and resilience," said Benjamin Levi, professor of pediatrics and humanities at Penn State College of Medicine and senior author of the study. "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?"

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, the researchers said.

"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," said 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. "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."

This preliminary research was a first step to examine how people view the relationship between humor, their experience being parented and their experience of parenting. The study will help lay the groundwork for understanding how to use humor constructively and the kinds of situations that are riskier for using humor.

They surveyed 312 people between the ages of 18 and 45. More than half said they were raised by people who used humor and 71.8% agreed that humor can be an effective parenting tool. The majority said they do or plan to use humor with their children and believe that it has more potential benefit than harm.

The team also found a correlation between a parent's use of humor and the way their children, who are now adults, viewed the way they were parented and their relationship with their parents. Of those who reported that their parents used humor, 50.5% said they had a good relationship with their parents and 44.2% reported they felt their parents did a good job parenting them. On the other hand, of those who said their parents didn't use humor, only 2.9% reported a good relationship with their parents and 3.6% reported that they thought their parents did a good job parenting them.

While it's not surprising that parents would use humor with their children if they were raised by caregivers who did the same, Levi said the stark differences between the two groups was unexpected.

The research team is expanding on this preliminary study and are surveying a larger and more diverse cohort of parents as well as collecting qualitative research based on parents' experience using humor.

"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.

Erik Lehman, biostatistician at Penn State, and Anne Libera, director of comedy studies at Chicago's The Second City, also contributed to the paper.

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Scientists capture humor’s earliest emergence

Young children's ability to laugh and make jokes has been mapped by age for the first time using data from a new study involving nearly 700 children from birth to 4 years of age, from around the world. The findings, led by University of Bristol researchers and published in Behavior Research Methods, identifies the earliest age humour emerges and how it typically builds in the first years of life.

Researchers from Bristol's School of Education sought to determine what types of humour are present in early development and the ages at which different types of humour emerge. The team created the 20-question Early Humour Survey (EHS) and asked the parents of 671 children aged 0 to 47 months from the UK, US, Australia, and Canada, to complete the five-minute survey about their child's humour development.

The team found the earliest reported age that some children appreciated humour was 1 month, with an estimated 50% of children appreciating humour by 2 months, and 50% producing humour by 11 months. The team also show that once children produced humour, they produced it often, with half of children having joked in the last 3 hours.

Of the children surveyed, the team identified 21 different types of humour. Children under one year of age appreciated physical, visual and auditory forms of humour. This included hide and reveal games (e.g., peekaboo), tickling, funny faces, bodily humour (e.g., putting your head through your legs), funny voices and noises, chasing, and misusing objects (e.g., putting a cup on your head).

One-year-olds appreciated several types of humour that involved getting a reaction from others. This included teasing, showing hidden body parts (e.g., taking off clothes), scaring others, and taboo topics (e.g., toilet humour). They also found it funny to act like something else (e.g., an animal).

Two-year-olds' humour reflected language development, including mislabelling, playing with concepts (e.g., dogs say moo), and nonsense words. Children in this age group were also found to demonstrate a mean streak as they appreciated making fun of others and aggressive humour (e.g., pushing someone).

Finally, 3-year-olds were found to play with social rules (e.g., saying naughty words to be funny), and showed the beginnings of understanding tricks and puns.

Dr Elena Hoicka, Associate Professor in Bristol's School of Education and the study's lead author, said: "Our results highlight that humour is a complex, developing process in the first four years of life. Given its universality and importance in so many aspects of children's and adults' lives, it is important that we develop tools to determine how humour first develops so that we can further understand not only the emergence of humour itself, but how humour may help young children function cognitively, socially, and in terms of mental health.

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Delivering the news with humor makes young adults more likely to remember and share

 In the early decades of televised news, Americans turned to the stern faces of newsmen like Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather as trusted sources for news of the important events in America and around the world, delivered with gravitas and measured voices. The rise of comedy-news programs, helmed by the likes of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, and Samantha Bee, raised concerns over the blending of entertainment and news. But could the merging of humor and news actually help inform the public?

In fact, new research suggests that humor may help keep people informed about politics. A study from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the School of Communication at Ohio State University found that, when compared to non-humorous news clips, viewers are not only more likely to share humorously presented news but are also more likely to remember the content from these segments.

"For democracy to work, it is really important for people to engage with news and politics and to be informed about public affairs," says senior author Emily Falk, Professor of Communication, Psychology, and Marketing at Annenberg. "We wanted to test whether humor might make news more socially relevant, and therefore motivate people to remember it and share it."

The researchers recruited young adults (18-34 years old) to watch a variety of news clips, which they designed to vary, so that some ended with jokes and others did not. In addition to collecting data on participants' brain activity using fMRI technology, the researchers administered a memory test to determine how much information participants retained from watching the clips. The researchers also asked participants to answer questions about how likely they would be to share the news clips with others.

Participants were more likely to remember information about politics and government policy when it was conveyed in a humorous rather than non-humorous manner and were more willing to share the information online. The findings also show that humorous news clips elicited greater activity in brain regions associated with thinking about what other people think and feel, which highlights the social nature of comedy.

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