Humour as a Resource for Children

Humour is present even in young children, although in rudimentary forms, and children’s stages of humour development can be observed from infancy to middle childhood (Bergen, Play as a context for humor development. In D. F. Fromberg & D. Bergen, Eds., Play from Birth to Twelve: Contexts, Perspectives, and Meanings (pp. 159–172). Routledge, 2015; Bergen, Humor as a developmental phenomenon: The contributions of Paul McGhee. In W. Ruch & J. Goldstein (Eds.), Special Issue of HUMOR: Festschrift for Paul McGhee. Humor across the lifespan, theory, measurement, and applications, 2018). Young children find events and objects humorous as soon as they “know” what should be happening in behaviours and language, and they laugh at environmental variations that cause humour, such as a picture of a dog wearing a hat. During the early childhood years, they begin to produce actions and language that make others laugh and use various conventions of humour (e.g., riddles, unusual actions, language play) to elicit laughter. By early elementary age, they produce humour in the joke format, although they may not tell the joke correctly or know how to explain why it is funny, and by later elementary age, many children are adept at telling jokes and using other forms of humour effectively. By that age, gender differences may appear in relation to when and where females and males express their humour, as well as in the types of humour they express. Humour is both a pervasive factor in positive child development and a major resource for children when they encounter scary, painful, or unusual circumstances. Both their own humour generation and their responses to adult generated humour during stressful life situations can be observed. Thus, humour can serve as a resource for children both for helping them understand their everyday world and for enabling them to deal with traumatic experiences in their lives.