How making children laugh can help brains become more resilient to struggle and open to learning
Laughter creates neural connections that help children handle stress and embrace new experiences
Child laughing. Image from Alamy.
Making children laugh can build deep emotional connections and soothe their nervous systems, making them more resilient and open to new ideas, a leading child development expert tells us.
Dr Jacqueline Harding, director of Tomorrow’s Child and an early childhood expert at Middlesex University, has carried out extensive research into how laughter and play contribute to healthy brain growth, emotional wellbeing and social bonding.
Through her own empirical research and analysis of existing studies in biology, psychology and sociology, Dr Harding argues in her new book The Brain That Loves to Laugh that laughter can help children navigate life’s challenges and better handle stress.
“Hope and humour, it seems, are not just the seasoning of life, but foundational to a recipe for healthy development,” she says. “When we see children laugh, we witness the brilliance of the brain in action: learning, connecting, and growing.”
Laughter in the brain
Laughter is not frivolous, Dr Harding argues, it is a complex biological phenomenon. It precedes the neural development of speech, yet it engages a distributed network of brain regions, including motor areas and the prefrontal cortex.
It influences heart rate, respiration and production of antibodies. It decreases stress hormones cortisol and epinephrine, and increases ‘happiness chemicals’ dopamine, serotonin and endorphins. It can strengthen the immune system and improve memory.
Neuroimaging studies suggest that laughter plays a significant role in brain activity, as humour is cognitively demanding and engages neuroplasticity. It challenges the brain to predict and resolve tension between conflicting ideas, providing a mental workout that enhances creative thought and activates both the working memory and frontal lobes.
On the other hand, prolonged stress negatively affects both physical and mental development. It can impair learning, increase adult stress risk, suppress immune function, and contribute to illness.
“I believe that as we continue to wrestle with humour – this most intriguing human function – we must strive to shake off any dismissal of its frivolous nature and allow its serious contribution to human learning and life in general to shine,” Dr Harding explains.
Hope and humour in parenting
In parents and their children, laughter can boost the levels of happy chemical oxytocin and enhance neural synchrony during parent-child interactions – in other words, build emotional bonds. These bonds are beneficial to the child and even contribute to a reduction in parental burnout and stress.
Research shows that laughter helps develop social skills and emotional intelligence. This does not mean parents need to rattle off jokes, she suggests, but simple shared play and laughter between parents and children, with eye contact, smiles, close proximity and joint attention on a task can all foster connection.
“Creative, happy play does its most brilliant work at a molecular level, especially at a time when the human brain is at its most receptive,” Dr Harding says. “Spontaneous joyful play is an antidote to stress, as it increases levels of endorphins released by the brain.”
Laughter and emotional resilience
As well as nurturing bonds, ‘humour and hope’ can improve a child’s resilience to stressful events, Dr Harding suggests.
“The link between co-regulation and self-regulation is now well established. Co-regulation means the way in which the baby is guided by a caring and supportive adult early in life, so that they have a working model to draw upon for their own self-regulation as they mature. The immune system needs a store of positive experiences from which to draw,” Dr Harding explains.
In a child’s brain, the limbic system, which regulates functions such as emotion, behaviour, and long-term memory, develops alongside the brain’s executive functions that help us plan, evaluate, and make decisions.
“So, early emotional experiences become embedded in the architecture of the brain. Stated simply, the emotional state of young children directly influences how they navigate their way through the world,” she adds.
Of course, some children have already experienced extensive trauma. But even then, she says, carefully finding gentle ways to introduce joy and hope, and ease the burden on their nervous system, can help to find a path back to feeling safe and open to new experiences.
Laughter and learning
Dr Harding challenges the current protocols for early years education, asking if there can, and should, be more room for humour. She advocates for integrating humour into educational settings to enhance learning and improve retention of key concepts.
“Humour can reduce the cognitive load, making complex information more digestible and memorable. Could it be that hope, humour, and human connection are the missing links we need to refresh the current educational paradigm?” she asks.
Dr Harding argues that humour encourages human connection and uplifts the nervous system, creating a much better environment for learning to take place.
“Safe relationships and non-stressful play environments promote learning. The curriculum must never be prioritised over those two fundamental factors.
“Maybe, just maybe, one day the value of hope, humour, and human connection will be taken as seriously as it deserves.”