Humor is afirst cousin of wisdom. It keeps us balanced. It prevents us from taking life too seriously. We especially need it for the transitions in life. Look at the funny stories and jokes about honeymoons, marriage, mid-life, tragedies, and death.

Right after World War I, an old woman was told by the authorities that the place she had lived in all of her life was no longer Russia. It was now part of Poland. "Thank God," she answered, "I always hated those Russian winters." In the face of great loss, she kept her balance through humor.

From a teenager's point of view, even suicide can be humorous. Take a story my fifteen-year-old neighbor josh told me. A man was lying on a railroad track, munching a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. "What are you doing?" someone asked him.
"Committing suicide," he answered.
"If you're committing suicide, why do you have a sandwich in your hand?"
"In this country, before the train comes," he answered, "a man could starve to death."

Sadly, our society tends to downplay humor in raising children. We hear that children need to emphasize competition to be successful today; that they have to get a leg up on their peers; that the next generation will not do as well as we have done; and that college will be almost out of the reach of the middle class. Even at Mommy and Me classes, some mothers push their infants to crawl, sit and roll over better than their diapered, dribbling peers. Under pressure like this, laughter becomes a foreign language that serves no profitable purpose.

Bonnie and I have seen how important humor is, even in psychotherapy. Clients begin to get better when they see the humorous side of their problems. Several years ago, 1 was treating a very depressed man. At the beginning of one session, I saw him studying my feet, obviously puzzled. I looked down and saw that I had put on two different shoes, one black and the other brown—a mistake Bonnie would have no trouble believing. Realizing what I had done, I admitted my mistake. We both began to laugh at the incongruity of me—the doctor—supposedly having it more together than the client. Later, he told me he started his recovery from that session, when he saw I could laugh at myself.

A healthy sense of humor is as important to our children's growth as academic achievement, economical success or physical prowess. Because life has become so serious, we need more than ever to foster humor in ourselves, in our families, and in our children.

Whenever our whole family laughs together, it's like everyone hugging one another at the same time. There's a warm feeling of being connected. Even our seventy-pound dog Allie recognizes something special is going on, since she always comes bounding in whenever she hears us all laughing.

Parents can foster humor in the home. Susan, a mother of two boys, eight and ten, told us about the time her family was using rice bowls for dinner. She had warned them that round rice bowls could easily tip over if they were not careful. When she tried to spear a piece of chicken from the bottom of her bowl a little too enthusiastically, she missed the chicken, but managed to launch the bowl. As if in slow motion, Susan said, her bowl climbed into the air, then turned over as it made its way down, slowly showering grains of rice all over her before it somersaulted off the table to land upside-down on her lap. While her family stared wide-eyed, with open mouths in disbelief, Susan's warning echoed back to her. She burst out laughing. Since it now was safe, her kids joined her.

Susan's sense of humor taught her children a wonderful lesson. They returned it, too. After the laughter had died down, one of the boys looked at her. "How come you can laugh when you spill things, but you won't let us laugh when we do it?" he asked.

Susan's family is in good hands. She doesn't take life too seriously. She can laugh at herself. She sees the humor in the incongruity of a mother doing exactly the opposite of what she warned her kids about. Listen to your children. They help us stay balanced.


From Nurturing the Souls of Our Children, by Thomas F. Geary.