Children laugh a lot but they don’t think everything is funny to them. Funnily enough, young children don’t have a sense of humor. The younger the child, the easier it is to see the connections in the brain and the cognitive capacity necessary in order to understand jokes.
Around the age 6 or 7, children develop a sense of humor when they discover that certain words can have more than one meaning. Riddles are one of the first methods for developing a sense of humor. Only at this stage of their understanding do they develop the ability to distinguish between two meanings. Without this ability it is impossible to understand the punch line of every joke. Having a sense of humor has benefits in the development of children from intellectual benefits and social benefits to health benefits.
Intellectual Development
Due to the fact that humour is an intellectual game of language, kids develop their sense of humour together with their language. This is the reason jokes and riddles appear at the end of grade one or at the beginning of the second year of learning to read. Until then, many kids need an explanation as to why the joke was funny.
Understanding humour helps children increase their general knowledge. A correlation has been found between kids' sense of humour and their creativity. Their ability to understand that there is more than one meaning to a word, expression or sentence, helps them later on with problem solving.
Social Stimulation
Kids understand very early that telling jokes is a great way to get attention. In an adult situation, if an adult tells a joke and everyone is laughs, kids will try to imitate grown up jokes. Their first times seem funny and they try to re- tell the joke without understanding the punch line. When they try to tell it, we can understand why humour is not that funny when you don’t understand.
For kids, humour is a way to establish a certain social status. Kids telling jokes are found to be more socially accepted. They also found that kids using humours make others feel better with their problems and creates an atmosphere that helps communication, an ability that makes others like them.
Emotional stimulation
A lot has been written about the Emotional Intelligence (EQ). The ability to handle feelings is one of the highest ability in EQ. People who can handle their feelings better, were found to be successful in most of their life areas. In many researches on EQ, they found that humour is effective in handling emotions, establishing positive attitude and the ability to handle hard situations.
Laughing for body and soul
Kids laugh a lot. Most of the time when you look at kids, they are laughing. Laughter is an expression of joy and happiness. Much research has been done about the contribution of laughter to people’s health. It was found to help with heart problems, respiratory illnesses, blood pressure, viruses and tumours. Because the main problems of the modern world are related to stress, laughter is sure the great solution. The younger kids develop this ability, the better they could handle stress in the future.
Tips for parents:
• Use humour at home around the dinner table
• Help kids understand the double meaning
• Help your young kids practice telling a joke and be patient with them when they say things that make no sense
• Get joke books and riddle books from the library and read it with them
• And the last thing, comedy movies are very helpful in developing sense of humour. Watch comedy movies with your kids and make sure the humour is suitable to their age. Many animation movies are great because they always have a funny character, no matter how serious the movie is.
All the recommendations here are good for kids and especially good for their tensed parents.
Tsoof and Eden love to download full movies from the Internet.
