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Good-People

We Need to Keep Laughing

Updated: Apr 2, 2019

Laughter promotes affection, understanding, support and dialogue, and promotes a close relationship with others.

Your baby has been experimenting with making sounds from her first month, from coos to gurgles to throaty sighs, similes. Laughter is her next step in learning to communicate.
Some researchers have counted that children laugh between 300 and 400 times a day, compared to 20 times or none that adults do. We know that children are funny.

Caspar Addyman, a researcher at the Center for Brain and Cognitive Development at the University of London, one of the leading experts on the subject of the science of children's laughter says. "We do not know when a sense of humour develops. Most start laughing at two or three months. A significant minority even after ten months. It's a mystery. One thing is certain: babies learn to laugh long before they walk or communicate in other ways. "


Children laugh often at things that the adults have long stopped seeing funny. Their humour seems, in appearance, as something very simple, because younger children are not yet capable of understanding or reproducing long and complex narrative structures.

Along with crying, the smile is the first social behaviour of the baby, waiting for the development of speech. The subtleties of irony and double meaning are at first out of their possibilities. Their humour is obvious imitative.

With the entry into primary school, with the assumption of the first rules, it is precisely the violation of them that causes great fun. Humour is a way to establish links with their new school world and to consecrate, in some way, their exit from the family home. In this period children laugh at each other about the same things: for them, it means that they belong to the same social group.


Here are some ways to make your child laugh with physical comedy:

- Play a game to see who can make the silliest face.

- Start talking and then pretend to fall asleep. Make loud snoring noises. Wake up, begin talking again, and fall back asleep.

- Move in super-slow motion


Here are some ways to make kids laugh with silly props:

- Make their elbows squeak! The secret is to hide one of these squeaky toys in your hand while you squeeze their elbow, arm, etc.

- When the phone rings, pick up the sponge and say, “Hello?” After several failed attempts, pick up another object (like a shoe) and say a little louder, “HELLLOO?!!”

- Try to wear something that’s too big. Then put it on them and say, “Wait. Where did you go?”


To make your child laugh with silly words, try out these goofy ideas:

- Speak in gibberish or add a non-sense word to a normal sentence.

- Instead of saying, “Want to come with me to run errands?” you could say, “Who wants to take a ride in the spaghettio?”

- Talk in a funny voice.



My kids in total hysterics as they turn me into a Lion in their "hair salon" (aka hip London restaurant)



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