Poster #134 - Laughing with Mom and Dad: Parents’ Long Term Contribution to Their Child’s Socio-Emotional Adaptation

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

There are a multitude of benefits of laughter in adults (e.g., promotes mental health and wellbeing; see Tugade et al., 2004), yet there is a limited body of research focusing on the benefits of laughing for children. While the majority of research on parent-child interactions focuses on the negative contributions parents have towards their child’s development, parents also have the ability to promote their child’s wellbeing, especially by making them laugh. In humans, it is during play that laughter emerges the quickest (Panksepp & Burgdorf, 2010). When a child laughs with his parent, it is generally an indication of intimacy, complicity and confidence between the two. This study explores the ability of parents to make their child laugh and whether this contributes to the child’s long-term socio-emotional adaptation (i.e., externalizing/internalizing symptoms, self-esteem, and socio-emotional skills). First, we investigated how the laughter’s authenticity, intensity and control by the child, as well as the level of correspondence between the parent’s effort to make their child laugh and the child’s laughter, relate to the children’s socio-emotional adaptation 4 years later. Second, we assessed whether these associations differed according to the parent's gender. Third, we explored how the presence of an interaction effect between both parents affected the child’s socio-emotional adaptation (i.e., laughing with both parents, one parent, or none). Forty-five preschoolers (24 girls; Mage = 46.47 months) came to the laboratory in separate visits with their mother and father (counterbalanced order), and participated in the Laughing Task Procedure (Bureau et al., 2014). This interaction was coded using a new instrument that assesses parental methods and child laugher (ICMR; Schmiedel & Bureau, 2017). Four years later, children completed two self-reported questionnaires. The Dominic Interactive was used to assess their externalizing and internalizing symptoms, as well as their socio-emotional skills (Valla et al., 1994). The Name-Liking Task was used to measure the child’s self-esteem (Gebauer et al., 2008). Table 1 illustrates the descriptive analyses for the whole sample. Objectives 1 and 2. Table 2 presents regression analyses and shows that, for mother-child dyads, high control of laughter and poor correspondence are associated with child's internalizing symptoms, high authenticity of laughter is associated with child's externalizing symptoms, high control laughter is associated with less strengths and competencies as well as low self-esteem, and that higher correspondence is associated with higher self-esteem. No significant association was observed for father-child dyads. Objective 3. Interaction effects (mother x father) show that the greater the discrepancy between the laughter characteristics presented with each parent, the more the child reports externalizing problems (control), internalizing problems (intensity, control, correspondence) and low self-esteem (correspondence) four years later. These results suggest that laughing with mothers may have a greater impact on a child’s socio-emotional adaptation. Moreover, a lack of consistency in laughter with both parents seems to be associated long-term socio-emotional problems. The fact that these children are capable of laughing openly with one parent but not the other maybe indicative of problems in the relationship, therefore leading to more general social adaptation problems.

Authors

• Michela DiStefano, University of Ottawa
  Presenting Author

• Sabrina Schmiedel, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jean-Francois Bureau, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author