Humor can be an effective tool in parenting

They say laughter is the best medicine, but it can also be a good parenting tool, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.

In a pilot study, the team found that most people found humor to be an effective parenting tool, and that parents or caregivers’ use of humor impacted the quality of their relationships with their children. Among those whose parents used humor, most rated their relationships with their parents and the parenting process in a positive light. The researchers published their findings in the journal PLOS One.

“Humor can teach people cognitive flexibility, relieve stress, promote creative problem solving, and build 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 do you use humor constructively?” says Benjamin Levy, a professor of pediatrics and humanities at the Pennsylvania College of Medicine and the study’s senior author.

Although aspects of humor and play have been studied in a variety of settings and contexts of child development, the use of humor in parenting has not been formally examined, the researchers noted.

“There’s an interesting parallel between business and parenting, which are both hierarchical. In business, humor has been shown to help lower hierarchies, create better conditions for collaboration and creativity, and defuse tension,” says first author Lucy Emery, who was a medical student at Penn State Medical College during the study and is now a pediatric resident at Boston Children’s Hospital. “While parent-child relationships are more loving than business relationships, stressful situations often arise in parenting as well. Humor can help defuse those tensions and hierarchies and help both parties feel better about themselves in a stressful situation.”

This preliminary study is a first step toward exploring how people perceive the relationship between humor, their parenting experiences, and their experiences raising their own children. The study will help lay the groundwork for understanding how to use humor constructively and in what situations humor use may be riskier.

They surveyed 312 people aged 18 to 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. Most said they use or plan to use humor with their children and believe it does more good than harm.

The team also found a correlation between parents’ use of humor and how their now-adult children rate their parenting and their relationships 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% said they thought their parents were good parenting. On the other hand, among those who said their parents did not use humor, only 2.9% reported a good relationship with their parents, and 3.6% thought their parents did a good job of parenting.

While it's not surprising that parents would use humor with their children if they were raised that way themselves, Levy noted that the difference between the two groups was unexpectedly large.

The research team is expanding this pilot study by conducting a survey among a larger, more diverse group of parents and collecting qualitative data based on parents' experiences of using humor.

"I hope that people can learn to use humor as an effective parenting tool, not just to relieve stress, but to develop resilience, cognitive flexibility, and emotional flexibility in themselves and to model that for their children," Levy said.

Eric Lehman, a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania, and Anne Libera, director of the comedy studies program at Chicago's Second City, also contributed to the paper.

The Pennsylvania College of Medicine's Department of Humanities provided support for this research.