They say laughter is the best medicine, but it might just be the secret to better parenting. According to a new study led by researchers at Penn State, parents who pepper their interactions with their children with a little more humor tend to have stronger relationships with them.
In a pilot study published in the journal PLOS One, the researchers found that quite a good number of people regard humor as a very potent tool for parenting. Researchers found out that such a parent’s use of humor positively affects the quality of a parent’s relationship with his or her child. Amongst those whose parents used humor, the majority reflected positively on their upbringing and their relationship with their parents.
“Humor can help 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. Levi, who wields humor in his clinical practice as well as with his children, wondered how it might be constructively used in parenting.
While the role of humor and play has been documented in a variety of contexts and child development more broadly, its specific utilization in parenting has never been researched. “There’s an interesting parallel between business and parenting, which are both hierarchical,” said first author Lucy Emery, a pediatrics resident at Boston Children’s Hospital. Humor in business diminishes hierarchies, she explained, as it does in parenting, but it also encourages collaboration and creativity while cutting tension. Similarly, humor in parenting can diffuse stress and further bond the relationship between the parent and the child.
The pilot research opened a platform where people volunteered their views on how they think that humor is related to their experience as parents. 312 people between the ages of 18-45 years participated in the study. Of this number, more than half were raised by their parents using humor, while 71.8% agreed that in the first place, humor can be used as an effective tool for raising children. The majority said they had used or planned to use their sense of humor on children, thinking it offers more benefits than risks.
It also found that there was a link between a parent’s use of humor and adult children’s perception of their rearing. Of those who reported their parents used humor, 50.5 percent said they had a good relationship with their parents, and 44.2 percent felt their parents did a good job raising them. By contrast, of those whose parents did not use humor, only 2.9% said they had a good relationship with their parents and 3.6% thought their parents did a good job.
The yawning gap between these figures surprised even Levi herself. The researchers are now scaling up the study to a larger, more representative sample of parents and gathering qualitative information on how parents felt when using humor.
Some of that was due to the support of the humanities department at Penn State College of Medicine; statistical analysis courtesy of Erik Lehman, a biostatistician at Penn State, and Anne Libera, director of comedy studies at Chicago’s The Second City.