Healthyvives Health Blog

We need to laugh to keep ourselves healthy and moody. Without a sense of humour life can be a colourless procession of tasks and duties. With it life takes a vigour and vitality. We enjoy it. We have more enthusiasm to share with others. We are more fun to be with.

Mainly the children who grew up without a sense of humour are frozen in a state of defensiveness and anxiety. Their self esteem collapses in their worry about being wrong. They are afraid to laugh, and especially at always wondering about what people thinks about me.

How can you benefited by laugh:

Lighten up yourself

You can say you are stuck in traffic, your frenemy whispers behind your back; you are hauled over the coals by your boss. What do you do? Shout abuses? Rail against fate? Let it ruin your day?  Or just make it just funny when recounting it to somebody else?

When you are at home and your kids throw up on your bed, break your neighbor’s window, paint a mural on your front door, smear Vaseline on your prized leather sofa. Screaming, shrieking, smacking is counted-productive. After a suitable punishment, reminisce about own bad old day’s and chuckle about the present misdeeds. Write it up in a journal to be opened ten years hence.

Turn trouble into fun when your child does something strange or stupid, like clogging the toilet with play Doh, by cracking a silly bodily function joke. Try not to blow your top when your daughter is cheeky; a quip will breach her resolve to make you miserable.

Sharing children misdeeds, not in a complaining way but with humour at bedtime with yours spouse is a perfect ending to a day.

How to spark smiles

If you feel that your child is not laughing enough

Start a chuckle provoking collection of books which are suitable for them, mad magazine, comics, cartoons and DVDs. Dip into one of them together when you feel that your child is taking himself too seriously, or is feeling low.

Be spontaneous. Bundle up the kids for a trip to the zoo, and watch the antics of the monkeys.

Teach her/his to look at the lighthearted side of the situation. So she has broken her/his leg and cannot take part in the school play, but ask her friends to come over to decorate the cast.

Stick cartoons on the fridge and on the study table.

Sing funny rhymes which require touch and tickling such as this little piggy goes to the market.

Gives everybody pet names, the sillier the merrier. As they like.

Learn to see the humour in everyday situation.

Have each one tell a joke or a riddle at dinner time.

When waiting for your doctor, plane, train, choose a stranger and weave a comical story around him.

Laugh out loud even when life sucks. Your boss lamed you for messing a deal. Create silly scenario around him.

When an argument gets too serious, have a make-up puppet perform a dance.

Jokes Aside

Tell your children what kind of jokes and words you do not want used in yours presence and preferably not in your absence.

Communal jokes are very popular in school and people even children. Pass them around without blinking an eyelid.

For starters you have to believe that group and community jokes can be demeaning to the target, which are seen as objects of derision. Only then can you rein in your kids.

The first thing that you need to do is avoid telling touchy incentive jokes yourself. Let other people know that you are uncomfortable when they use words and spout jokes that can offend others, even at the risk you being called a goody-goody killjoy.

Ask your child how you would feel if you are at the receiving end of a put down joke.

Tell your child that it is unkind to make jokes and pass remarks that poke fun at people about something that they can do nothing about community, colour, culture, that you need to laugh with and not at people that belittling somebody wrong.

Response to and talk about incidents of insensitivity.

Tick your child off if she makes fun of somebody who walks with a limp or talks with a lisp.