Hello and welcome back to Simplicity Diaries with me Ken Jon-Payne. This week I wanted to talk about humour and the role of humour in working with our kids. You know I was speaking with a mum and this really came up about how she really wished to be lighter and have levity with her kids and she realised that every time she did that things just rolled along, things in my words de-escalated and she felt much closer and a kind of disaster was averted so to speak.
For a long time I've also recognised the value of humour in my own parenting with my own kids. It's so often when we can introduce humour like that it's like it unloosens a knot. You know you feel that this knot of interaction is getting tighter and tighter and humour just gives space to that kind of knot.
I'm reminded of a simple little story I've mentioned once before where I was working at a school and I would often lead the children out to play games. We didn't have a fancy gymnasium or anything like that, we just had this hundreds of metres of rope that I figured out how to put on a winder. Now bear with me because this does have a relationship to humour in a moment but we would go out and very often we would find that others had just thrown all this rope into a big tangle and had not used the winder to wind it up and the class I was with would say, yay, that's okay, let's go and they would set their watches and they would time how long they needed to take to undo the knot and they would send two children right up to the top of the building, up the stairs that could overlook and give us guidance and then we would begin and we learnt never pull on a tangle.
If you pull on a tangle the rope gets more and more gnarled and there'd be children, the two children or so, leaning out the window saying, don't pull on it Joseph, don't pull on it Jacob or whatever they were shouting out because it's so hard to not just pull on it and usually we could get, it was I guess a couple of hundred yards of rope untangled in three or four minutes and there would be this big shout of triumph from the children and they would stop their watches to see if it was a record but for me that metaphor of never pulling on a tangle, it's true in many areas, isn't it? It's true for massage therapists who will often massage away from where an area is very painful to create space. They don't go right at the gnarled knot in our shoulders or back or wherever. They'll massage the arms and the legs and gradually create space.
It's the same thing. It's very much the same thing with family life. Don't pull on a tangle.
Now that's good advice in some ways but what I want to talk about and just mention here this week is humour is a major way to not pull on a tangle. It's starts to unravel and give space to a situation that was going to become tight and knotty and frankly just difficult to work out. So the kinds of humour I want to mention are very, very varied but what I've learnt is the best kind of humour is self-aware humour and now I want to differentiate this from self-deprecating humour.
I'm a little bit wary of self-deprecating humour particularly from women. Mothers tend to go there, can go there. It borders on a self-put down and I don't think that's good for little boys and girls, particularly little girls to hear from mothers is self-put downs.
The world is doing that quite enough to women folk without us doing more of it ourselves, particularly if you're a mother. But what I mean by self-aware humour is let's say a situation comes up where perhaps a child says to you, you're not listening to me, you're just being so bossy and you could fire back at that child and say, young lady, you may not speak like that to me. If my mother, if I had spoken like that to my mother, well, you know, and you're into it and then she says, well, I don't care about your stupid mother.
And then you may not talk about your grandmother like that. Do you hear where this is going, right? It's not going anywhere good. Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't give boundaries to kids.
You know, if they say edgy stuff like that, that's, you know, of course, but to be able to say to a child of, well, you're not listening to me and you're just so bossy, to be able to say, oh, really? I'm being, I'm being bossy? Oh gosh. And if it's a little child, you might say, I just need to take that cotton wool out my ears, don't I? Oh my. Or, you know, to be able to just to lighten the mood like that and say, oh my goodness.
Well, I think I better open my ears or yeah, there is nothing worse than someone who's bossy and doesn't listen. Is there? And the child just looks at you and says, no, there's not. And well, I hope no one here is being bossy and not listening.
Let's just hear what you have to say. That just that little bit of, I don't know if it's humor, but it's levity, but, and it's not self-deprecating. It's not saying, oh, I'm so sorry, sweetheart.
I, I always do that. What a silly mama you have. That is self-deprecating.
The self-aware humor, which I just gave an example of, helps lighten a situation. And something else it does, and it particularly does, is that it also signals to a child that the adult, mom or dad, is in charge. There, because you can't be in charge of the home unless you're in charge of yourself as a parent.
And self-aware humor shows a child very directly and practically that you know, that you are regulating your own emotions, that you're aware of what's going on. You can make a little bit of fun of the situation and that you don't get caught up in an escalation. Because when you get caught up in escalation with a child, it feels like the more it escalates, the more you feel like the incredible shrinking adult.
You know, you feel like you can end up, you know, with a child saying, I won't. And you say, you jolly well will. And no, I won't.
And you know, you just like, you're arguing with a six year old and you're, well, not six. And it just feels awful. This way of working with self-aware humor can really bring a child a sense of safety.
I know my father, I know my mother is in control of themselves because they've just made a little bit of a funny joke and that makes me feel safe. So in the coming weeks, if you can bring more self-aware humor into your parenting, it would be so interesting to hear about this. It'd be so interesting to hear about it, particularly in our forum.
I'd love to see people post, you know, it'd be thrilling to see people post about bringing more humor into their, their daily lives with their kids. Later on down the track, we'll probably be taking this up actually as, as a workshop theme. But for now, I just thought I'd plant this seed.
Hope that's helpful. Bye bye. Bye bye.
