"Sometimes," said author of the dystopian Divergent trilogy said, "crying or laughing are the only options left, and laughing feels better right now."
Although the COVID-19 pandemic certainly seems, to many of us, to be altogether less dramatic — not to mention a lot more boring — than Divergent and many other dystopian stories that have been popular in recent times, there's no doubt that we're all living at some kind of historical crossroads.
COVID's not the only thing going round that's contagious, after all. Laughter, too, can be caught. And infecting our kids with that bug can do wonders for their mental health.
How is growing up amid the COVID-19 pandemic impacting children's emotional and social health?
Because children often have far milder cases of COVID-19 than their parents and grandparents if they do become infected, youth hasn't been a focus since the start of the pandemic. That doesn't mean that young people aren't tremendously impacted by the pandemic, though.
Research from China reported that over 90 percent of children and teens had serious concerns about the pandemic. Some were worried about their parents who worked on the frontline of the battle against COVID. Others were worried their education would be impacted, or worried because they'd already missed graduation. Some had relatives or friends who were infected with COVID-19.
Even those who weren't directly personally impacted did go into lockdown, faced living under the shadow of a pandemic, and missed out on time with peers and relatives outside of their households. It's no surprise that significant numbers, around in in five, had symptoms of depression, and many found they had an internet or smartphone addiction — what else was there to do but to "hang out online", after all?
Researchers speculated that young people, both children under 12 and adolescents, were hard hit in terms of mental health especially because for many, COVID-19 would have been the first really big, scary, thing to happen in their lives. Because they don't have the life experience the rest of us do, they haven't had the chance to develop stress coping mechanisms yet.
An Italian study highlighted another dimension. As families went into COVID-19 lockdowns, they faced the challenges of not just doing many things they previously did outside the home (working, studying, socializing) behind closed doors, but they were also on each other's lips nearly 24/7. Parental stress, about both the pandemic and the economy, is easily transferred to kids, who are in lockdown one of the easiest "targets" to vent frustrations to. Parental stress trickles down. Serious anxiety can result.
Yet another dimension would be physical — research suggests that spending more time at home and out of school means less physical activity, more stress eating, more time spent behind computer, phone, or TV screens, and less regular sleep patterns. As physical health suffers, so does mental health.
None of this is funny, so how can laughter therapy help? And how is laughter even therapy?
Before you think that real laughter comes only from genuine happiness or thinking something's funny, consider this. Research has actually identified five distinct kind of laughter — and genuine (or spontaneous) laughter is only one of them. The others are laughing induced through tickling, medication-induced laughing, and pathological laughing. The last kind would be "self-induced", or "simulated" laughter. Yes, the kind that non-scientists would probably simply "fake laughing".
We know from countless studies that spontaneous or real laughter has all sorts of health benefits, ranging from expected ones like better mood and reduced stress to perhaps surprising ones like improved immune system functioning, better pain tolerance, and cardiovascular benefits.
There's not a total scientific consensus, but some well-designed studies have found that the body can't tell fake laughing from real laughing, meaning that it would have the same benefits as genuine laughter. Also, as anyone who's heard the saying "fake it till you make it" knows, fake laughter can induce real laughter, if only because the fake laughter sounds genuinely funny (albeit in a pathetic kind of way).
So, how can you try 'laughter therapy' with your kids?
"Laughter therapy", or "laughter yoga", or "aerobic laughter therapy", are clinically-designed laughter therapy programs, and most borrow from cognitive behavioral therapy in their practice. They've been studied in the context of people with serious or chronic illnesses, as well as caregivers to people with chronic conditions.
They work, in that they improve stress levels and mental wellbeing. They're also silly enough to have the potential to make your kids laugh, as they're often interspersed with stretching (also good for the body, by the way!), breathing exercises, and even actual aerobics. Picture (pre-COVID, at least) a bunch of people sitting in a room, led by a therapist, all pretending to be laughing until they really do laugh.
Every family is different, but whatever gets your kids to laugh (for real, hopefully) will help alleviate the stresses and uncertainty they feel about COVID-19 and any other worries in their lives. Here are some things that would and have worked for my family:
- Watch comedy, or anything you all (or your kids) think is funny on the internet or TV.
- Sit down with a paper and some pencils. One person describes someone you all know (from media or in real life) in fairly abstract terms like "round face" or "loose curls to shoulder length", and everyone else tries to draw according to the instructions. At the end, you guess who you drew. The results can be hilarious.
- Play charades.
- Have a tickling sessions, if your kids are still small enough to put up with that.
- Have an at-home dressing-up contest.
- Put on music from your own youth and dance and sing along with it loudly. Your kids will laugh at you and not with you, but they'll probably be laughing.
- Teach grandma the floss dance via Zoom.
Your family will be different (maybe you hate drawing and charades). You will probably know what kinds of things make your kids laugh, and if oldies aren't working any more, experiment a little.