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Key points
- Because parental humor can be double-edged, doing good or doing harm, it must be sensitively managed.
- As the worldly risks of adolescence become more serious, parents can become more serious, too.
- The power of positive parental humor is that it can lighten hard times up.
Humor is double-edged.
To the good, it can provide many positive benefits. To name a few, it can lift spirits, restore perspective, lighten seriousness, relax tension, relieve stress, feel funny, provoke laughter, ease sorrow, act playful, encourage acceptance, and keep us smiling.
When people lose their sense of humor, they can lose resilience: “Life is all serious and sad!” Now even small annoyances can feel like large adversities.
To the bad, it can inflict a variety of harms. To name a few, it can belittle, put down, make fun of, tease, and be hostile, hurtful, insulting, sarcastic, mean, attacking, and intimidating.
When people use humor this aggressively, they can become threatening and bullying and inflict harm: “Their joking hurts my feelings!” Now a quick and cutting wit can cut deep with humor that doesn’t feel funny on the receiving end.
So, particularly in caring relationships, use humor for the good and not for the bad.
Humor with adolescents
For many moms and dads, their daughter’s or son’s adolescent years are the more serious, “the harder half of parenting,” compared to her or his more companionable, comfortable, and playful childhood years.
While they were more relaxed and fun-loving with the closely attached little child, parents can become more serious and anxious with the increasingly distant and adventurous adolescent. Now the separation from childhood has begun as the young person begins to push for social independence and for personal differentiation to express more individuality. In both ways, adolescence grows the parents and child further socially apart, which it is meant to do.
While growing independence can feel liberating and exciting for the teenager, while more expressive individuality can feel affirming, these can be troubling for parents who worry about the risks of more worldly interests, experimentation, and the influence of peers as they ponder when to keep holding on and when to dare more letting go.
With their child’s adolescence, parents can be more at risk of losing their sense of humor, becoming more unsmiling as growing anxieties about the teenager weigh them down: “My parents are less fun and funny to be with.” “My parents are more serious now.” “We’re not as easy with each other as we used to be.”
Laughing and caring
The more caring attachment there is in a relationship, the greater the sensitivity to hurt. Intimacy creates vulnerability this way. Enter teasing—making fun of someone to be funny by putting that person down. Come adolescence, beware of parental teasing. Simply put, if the joking wasn’t funny to the young person joked about, then it wasn’t funny. “I was just kidding!” is no good excuse for the injury received.
In general, because adolescence is a more sensitive age as physical and cultural change creates more self-consciousness, it is well to keep a tease-free home. Thus, older siblings are best disallowed from teasing younger ones. Humor that hurts isn’t funny; it is hostile, intended to do harm. So consider this family rule: Make fun with, but not fun of anyone.
Humor begets laughter
Laughter can be a positive, mood-modifying experience. For example, people
- Laugh to have fun;
- Laugh to feel better;
- Laugh at what is funny;
- Laugh to ease some adversity;
- Laugh to cheer up and keep smiling;
- Laugh at oneself, at life, at the unexpected;
- Laugh to lighten one's mood and ease one’s hardships;
- Laugh to relax tension, lift spirits, and create perspective;
- Laugh to love life, create play, and enjoy each other’s company.
To lose one’s sense of humor can feel saddening, even depressing: “Nothing is funny.” “Life is all serious.” “I don’t laugh anymore.” Keeping one’s sense of humor has survival value: “I can always turn the funny side up.”
At best, making humor can feel accepting and empathetic: “Laughing together can lighten us up.” At worst, being the object of a humorous attack can feel painful and demeaning: “Being laughed at really hurts.”
Laughter and crying
Laughter and crying are not exactly opposites since they have this in common: Both can be used to process pain: “I can appreciate the absurdity of it!” “I can see the funny in the serious.” “I can lighten up hard times.” Laughter can help us accept the unwanted. Thus, I often found one supportive role when providing counseling to the unhappy was to help strengthen the client’s sense of humor: “Sometimes, if you can laugh about it, you can feel better about it.”
While laughing at others can be mean-spirited and cause people to feel put down, laughing at oneself can be affirming, even restoring—accepting of one’s frailties, peculiarities, and adversities. “Finding the funny” in life can partially ease the burden of a lot of troubles when people feel serious about their saddening cost. Now self-understanding can sometimes come from amused insight: “What a joke! Here I’ve been blaming my unhappiness on others, when all the time it’s been mostly me, acting my own worst enemy!”
Humor is restorative
In my work as a psychologist, helping suffering clients appreciate the funny in their lives was a valuable part of counseling. It was one small way to help reduce the “tyranny of troubles” that often brought them in seeking help: “Everything is awful!”
No. Although some aspects of their life may have felt in painful shambles, there were always others that were worth gratitude, even a smile. When part of one’s experience is beset by suffering, humor can restore perspective and be an emotional oasis. Despite unhappiness, smiling at what still feels funny can help energize recovery.
Humor as helpful
Humor can be helpful when it enables seeing the funny side of serious (“I can’t believe I did this to myself!”), can change one’s mental set from offended to accepting (“I can laugh about it now!”), and can lighten up hard times (“In some ways, it’s comical how things turned out!”)
As their child enters adolescence, keeping a parental sense of humor can be uplifting when it’s easy to let more complexity and challenge get them down. And it can be a gift to their teenager as light-hearted parents help their struggling daughter or son stay positive and keep perspective during this more challenging period of growing up.
So observe this rule for family humor: use it to lighten people up, but never to put anyone down.
