Research
Humour can be a key way for parents to build strong relationships with their children
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Freya Lucas
Aug 23, 2024
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Most people view humour as an effective parenting tool, believing that a parent or caregiver’s use of humor affects the quality of their relationship with their children.
To test this perception researchers from Penn State surveyed 312 people between the ages of 18 and 45 years.More than half said they were raised by people who used humor and 71.8 per cent 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 researchers published their findings in the journal PLOS One, with senior author Professor Benjamin Levi saying humour 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?” he shared.
While aspects of humor and play have been studied across various settings and in child development, the use of humour 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, humour has been shown to help reduce hierarchies, create better environments for collaboration and creativity and diffuse tension,” first author Lucy Emery added.
“While parent-child relationships are more loving than business relationships, stressful situations happen a lot when parenting. Humour 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 humour, 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.
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 per cent said they had a good relationship with their parents and 44.2 per cent 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 per cent reported a good relationship with their parents and 3.6 per cent 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, Professor 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 humour.
“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,” Professor Levi said.
Access the study in full here.
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