A Laugh A Day
Exercising your family’s funny bone.
by Deb DiSandro


Stress in families today is at an all-time high. For parents and children, it seems that laughter and joy have taken a back seat to the “do it all” and “be the best” mentality. In my own home, we found that the pressure to succeed had sucked the fun right out of our family life. So together, we looked for ways to raise our HQ (Humor Quotient). Here are some tips that helped us to find our family funny bone:

Admit Your Fears and Mistakes
Instead of upholding the illusion of being the Brady Bunch family, we started to talk about our fears and our failings. We discovered that humor often lies in the truth. At a dinner party recently, I admitted to a group of parents that when my 7-year-old puts her tooth under the pillow, she knows it can take anywhere from a week to ten days for the fairy to show up! Laughter filled the room and many other parents confessed that they too had experienced the tardy tooth fairy.

During family dinners, my husband and I often talk about the mistakes we might have made at work. This encouraged our teenage son to share a difficult moment at his first job. A customer pulled up to the drive-through window and started yelling at him for getting the wrong soda . My son said, “I’m sorry.” And the customer replied, “Oh, yeah, how sorry are you?” At a loss for words, my son thought for a second and blurted out, “Uh, I’m VERY sorry.” The customer laughed and the mistake was quickly forgotten.

Lower Your Expectations
In our family, we give each other permission to earn a C. That’s right, we discovered that sometimes it’s okay to be average. Somehow, we had bought into the idea that if something isn’t done perfectly, it isn’t worth doing at all. But we learned that we were willing to take more risks and try new things knowing that we only had to earn a C. I’ve hosted C dinner parties and C birthday parties and had more fun than when I used to strive for an A.

Laugh Now
Too often we say, “One day I’ll look back and laugh about this,” but in our family, we’ve found ways to laugh now. During long car trips, instead of playing the radio, we listen to comedy tapes. Bill Cosby is one of our favorites. His comedy is clean enough for even the youngest tykes. At the library, we take out humor books and joke books. We read the jokes out loud, and then see who can guess the punch line. Studies have shown that laughter can decrease levels of stress hormones, lower blood pressure and boost your immune system to help fight off disease. So, go ahead. Find your own funny bone, and laugh your way to a happy, healthy family.

Deb DiSandro is a humor columnist, speaker and author of Tales of a Slightly Off Supermom: Fighting for Truth, Justice and Clean Underwear (Pelican Publishing).