Is developing your child’s sense of humor a luxury? As parents, we have to teach so much largely because we often end up teaching the same things over and over again.

So being thoughtful about how to model humor and develop wit can seem above and beyond the call of duty.  However, once you learn the benefits of humor in a young child’s life—beyond the short lived happy feeling—I think that you will begin taking note of other funny parents’ lines and perhaps buy a knock-knock book.

The key factor to make your little one laugh, or at least chuckle, is simple.  Young children, even infants and toddlers, focus on learning social patterns through observation.  Your child takes this work quite seriously because recognizing routines orders the world from her and allows her to her focus energy on learning new things, instead of worrying about what is to come.  

You teach these social patterns.  Between 9-12 months, you probably started asking your infant to wave one hand and say, “Bye-bye.”  This is a social pattern.  So, after months and months of reinforcing waving and saying, “Bye-bye,” imagine your toddler’s surprise when you say, “Jenny, let’s wave ‘bye-bye’ to grandma with our feet.”  She’ll think that it’s funny. When it occurs to you to break a known social pattern, you will have found the key to little kid humor.

Humor and temperament

Your child’s hard-wired personality traits, or temperament, will determine just how and what she finds funny.  A child with a difficult or even slow-to-warm-up temperament has trouble adjusting to the unexpected; however, that does not mean that she does not have a sense of humor.  A toddler’s reaction to a clown is a great example.  

A child with an easy temperament will see the clown; study it; reach out to touch it; and laugh.  Other children will recognize a pattern of a man in the clown, but feel frightened of how the clown alters the pattern.  The same slow-to-warm-up toddler would likely laugh if you went into another room and put on big glasses and a red nose and came back into the room.  A child with a difficult temperament might never find something as extreme as a clown funny, but she may come to love word play as a preschooler.  Like a good comedian, watch your child’s reactions to the unexpected, so you can learn how to make her laugh more.

Humor in the family routine

Other than coming off in playgroup as a great parent, why should you work humor into your family routine?  The benefits are huge. So big that I say, “Don’t just do humor, use humor.”  Use humor to give your child a sense of empowerment that comes from knowing the social patterns around her so well that she can change them and all remains well.  

Use humor to relieve stress.  Life with a young child is full of conflict—conflicts that we, as parents, play out again and again.  (Ever feel stuck?) Well, next time you get into a morning struggle, pull out some creative playfulness.  Like this:

“Jordan, it’s time to put your socks and shoes on.”

“No!”

“Jordan, I said, ‘Come and get your socks and shoes on.’ Let’s go. Now.”

“No.”
….

“Hmmm. Okay...I will just have to put them on your teddy bear, but I am not sure if they will fit”

You broke the pattern, and you broke the tension…and at least got a strange look.  Sometimes just saying something completely out of the blue when tension builds allows for a chance to laugh and start over on a better foot.  In this way, you use humor instead of just going for a quick laugh. 

Humor hints

Feel like you don’t have a funny bone in your body, but want to instill a sense of humor in your child?  Or can you make folks at the office laugh, but clam up around your own kids? Here are some age appropriate ways to get started learning just what makes your child laugh:

As your child becomes mobile, physical humor brings laughs.  Toddlers focus on refining their large and small muscle abilities and also closely observe social patterns. Simply coming out of your room with a shoe on your head will bring joy because it interrupts the known pattern of how one gets dressed.  Sandra Boynton has a great book along this line of humor called Blue Hat, Green Hat (click below to learn more) in which a turkey can’t get the getting dressed pattern right.  If you get your hands on it, you will end up reading it more than once because toddlers love to repeat the same prank again and again. It’s as if your toddler is thinking, “This shouldn’t be happening….let’s try it again.” 

When our daughter started school, she went through a phase where she would put on multiple pairs of underpants when she got dressed in the morning and then wear them all day.  She felt so pleased with herself (that is, empowered) all day while waiting to “surprise” us.  That night when one of us would help her get into the bathtub, she would laugh and laugh as she counted how many pairs she had worn all day.  While laughing, she would point and say, “I got you.”  (As if we had some rule about how many pairs of panties she could wear.)  Before this, she had made us laugh often, but this initial prank of her own was special because we knew that she had thought ahead about how to make us laugh.

Yes, as parents, we need to teach a lot of things, and it can feel overwhelming. But using humor in your home is not a luxury; it is the grease that makes the whole parenting process run smoothly.  You can parent without humor, but you will experience more difficulty and less joy.  So be silly for your little one and look forward to the future pay offs.

By Anne Oxenreider