Keep your SENSE of HUMOR!!!

You can turn painful situations around through laughter.  If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it. Bill Cosby

Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I’ve had my share.  But whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude.  In the final analysis, you have got not to forget to laugh. Katharine Hepburn

Lighten up!  Enjoy the humor that can be found all around you…your 8-month-old eating spaghetti with her raincoat on, the 2-year-old that poops in the bathtub, an 8-year-old saying something funny on purpose!

Don’t take everything your child does with such complete seriousness.  Sure, if he is deliberately doing something you’ve told him not to do or is endangering himself, it’s not going to be funny and should be reacted to appropriately.

Your child is going to mirror you and if you take unexpected things that happen in your life as some sort of personal shortcoming or affront, he will imitate you.

Granted, you have to be sensible.  Your child pooping in the bathtub is probably not something you want to encourage by laughing about it in front of her.  You would have to respond accordingly and explain that poop in the bathtub makes a mess and you’d like for it to never happen again.  But, once you’ve cleaned everything up, you can laugh at the situation.

That might not be the best example, but the point I’m making is that normal childhood occurrences do not need to be treated as catastrophes.  If your toddler accidently knocks his cereal bowl onto the floor–that shouldn’t rate a tirade about how careless she was. Remember that children will often repeat behaviors that get them a lot of positive OR negative attention.

The impression we need to give our kids is that it’s okay to make an honest mistake and it’s ok to find humor in these situations. The ability to appear foolish and still be able to shake it off with humor is an endearing quality.  No one likes to hang around a person who never laughs at herself.

Laughter is the great neutralizer–it’s hard when you feel someone’s laughing at you, but the situation can be diffused if you can find a reason to laugh too.

Enjoy your children.  Let them enjoy being themselves.  Find something to laugh about every day together.  Shared laughter brings closeness and teaching them to see humor in their everyday lives brings balance and arms them to face the world.