Humor makes you a better parent, Penn State experts say

Raising kids is no joke — but good parents tell them anyway.

A lot of love and even more laughter: it’s the no-longer secret recipe parents should follow to cook up great, long-lasting relationships with their kids, per new findings from Penn State University.

“Humor can teach people cognitive flexibility, relieve stress and promote creative problem solving and resilience,” Benjamin Levi, lead author of the July study, revealed in a release Monday.

“My father used humor and it was very effective,” continued the professor of pediatrics and humanities at Penn State College of Medicine. “I use humor in my clinical practice and with my own children.”

“The question became, how does one constructively use humor?.”

It’s an age-old quandary that’s perplexed parents for years: is it better to be firm or friendly with their kids?

A recent survey of over 2,000 mothers and fathers with tots under age 6 found that the majority of adults (92%) feel that engaging in playful activity with their children is important for their overall growth and development. Respondents, too, indicated that silly pastimes such as dancing, tossing a ball back and forth, or getting in a game of Duck-Duck-Goose were great ways to share a few yucks with their young.

And the fun doesn’t have to stop once baby gets big.

A staggering 58% of Americans age 40 and older call mom and dad their best friend, per a June 26 poll conducted in honor of the “National Day of Joy.” Rather than buddying up with folks from their own generations, adult kids prefer spending quality time with their parents at malls, concerts and on vacations abroad.

For their evaluation, Levi and his team probed 312 people ranging in age from 18 to 45. The researchers determined that humor not only positively affects an adult’s relationship with their parents, but that it, too, benefits his or her bond with their own children.

“More than half [of the participants] said they were raised by people who used humor, and 71.8% agreed that humor can be an effective parenting tool,” reads the release. “The majority said they do, or plan to, use humor with their children and believe that it has more potential benefit than harm.”

And light-heartedness has everlasting values.

“Of those who reported that their parents used humor, 50.5% said they had a good relationship with their parents and 44.2% reported they felt their parents did a good job parenting them,” noted the report.

“On the other hand, of those who said their parents didn’t use humor, only 2.9% reported a good relationship with their parents and 3.6% reported that they thought their parents did a good job parenting them.”

Lucy Emery, a co-author of the study, added that a little levity often acts as a panacea in high-pressure scenarios — be they at work or home.

“There’s an interesting parallel between business and parenting, which are both hierarchical,” said the PSU medical student. “In business, humor has been shown to help reduce hierarchies, create better environments for collaboration and creativity and diffuse tension.”

“While parent-child relationships are more loving than business relationships,” Emery conceded, “stressful situations happen a lot when parenting.”

“Humor can help diffuse that tension and hierarchy, and help both parties feel better about a stressful situation.”

Endeavoring to take a deeper dive into merriment’s impact on bringing up a brood, the investigators plan to analyze a larger and more diverse cohort of parents, as well as collect qualitative research based on parents’ experience using humor.

“My hope is that people can learn to use humor as an effective parenting tool,” said Levi. “Not only to diffuse tension, but [to] develop resilience and cognitive and emotional flexibility in themselves and model it for their children.”