There are plenty of ways how kids can put a smile on their parents' faces. Talya Stone, a former public relations specialist turned blogger and the woman behind online journals Motherhood: The Real Deal and 40 Now What, finds humor in her children's actions as well as words.
"They never fail to delight with the hilarious things they say or do, which if we did as adults would probably have us locked away in some sort of facility!" she told Bored Panda.
A few months ago, young children's ability to laugh and make jokes has been mapped by age for the first time using data from a new study involving nearly 700 children from birth to four years of age.
The findings, discovered by University of Bristol researchers and published in Behavior Research Methods, identify the earliest age humor emerges and how it typically builds in the first years of life.
Researchers from Bristol's School of Education created the 20-question Early Humour Survey (EHS) and asked the parents of 671 children aged 0 to 47 months from the UK, US, Australia, and Canada, to complete it.
The team found the earliest reported age that some children appreciated humor was one month, with an estimated 50% of kids enjoying jokes by two months, and 50% making them by 11 months.
The team also found that once children learned how to actually produce humor, they did quite often, with half of the children having joked in the last three hours.
One-year-olds appreciated several types of humor that involved getting a reaction from others. This included teasing, showing hidden body parts (e.g., taking off clothes), scaring others, and taboo topics (for example, toilet humor). They also found it funny to act like someone or something else (e.g., an animal).
Two-year-olds' humor already reflected language development, including mislabelling, playing with concepts (e.g., "Dogs say moo!"), and nonsense words. Children in this age group also demonstrated a mean streak as they appreciated making fun of others.
Finally, 3-year-olds were found to play with social rules (e.g., saying naughty words just for the heck of it), and showed the beginnings of understanding tricks and puns.
"Our results highlight that humor is a complex, developing process in the first four years of life," Dr. Elena Hoicka, Associate Professor in Bristol's School of Education and the study's lead author, said. "Given its universality and importance in so many aspects of children’s and adults’ lives, it is important that we develop tools to determine how humor first develops so that we can further understand not only the emergence of humor itself, but how humor may help young children function cognitively, socially, and in terms of mental health."
However, as Talya Stone pointed out, there's a difference between laughing with and laughing at your kids.
"If it's the former, then, of course, go for it!" she said. "Younger children generally see laughter as a positive thing and love the attention of getting a laugh. Obviously, this changes as they get older so especially around the pre-teen and teen years when you most certainly wouldn't want to laugh at them unless you'd like a massive strop on your hands. As always, it's about reading the mood and atmosphere and knowing what the age-appropriate response is."
For some parents, however, being around their kids — let alone laughing with them — is still a luxury. According to the Pew Research Center, U.S. fathers today have more opportunities to care for their children than they did a half-century ago, but most (63%) say they spend too little time with their little ones.
Moms, by comparison, still do more of the child care and are more likely than dads to be satisfied with how much they get to be around their kids. Still, it's only about half (53%) that say this.