“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”
“Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.”
Keeping the joy in your child’s life through laughter and play can help everything from the smallest band aide emergency to deep hurts and struggles. Sometimes as parents we forget that most serious problems can lose some of their power if we laugh with our children.
Children invite us to play with them, laugh at their jokes, get us watch their silly antics worthy of Funniest Home Videos or just laugh at a funny sound they made. They bring joy to a parent’s life as well frustration because what is important to a parent is not always important to a child. Life has its rules, but without laughter we’ve lost our joy. In the parent’s attempt to get the child to ‘behave’ or ‘do a task’, seriousness takes over creating stress for both parent and child.
Lightening up the atmosphere with humor often gets the job done with fun.
Laughter is not only good for our relationship with our children, but for our health as well. Norman Cousins, in his book Anatomy of an Illness: As Perceived by the Patient, speaks of the power of laughter in helping the body’s own natural resources to heal illnesses. Laughter Therapist, Enda Junkins, LCSW says, “Laughter helps us roll with the punches that inevitably come our way.” She adds, “we need to laugh much more.” https://www.laughtertherapy.com
In my years as a therapist with children and adolescents, I have found the most profound moments of healing have been intertwined with humor. Appreciating a child’s funny bone and laughing with him or her joins us at a level of pure humanness rather that child/adult. When I let go of my ego and laugh at a situation, the child feels ‘seen and heard’. I speak more about the joys of entering the world of the child in my book, Turning the Hourglass: Children’s Therapeutic Passage Through Traumas and Past Lives, which gives accounts of true stories of children that I have laughed with in my twenty- five years of experience. It is available at https://www.amazon.com
Picture Sources: https://www.google.com
