Although there is a perception that young people are not aware of what is going on around them, we see that it has been destroyed recently. It is now known that observing the environment from a very young age is effective in forming the personality of people.
Although humor is an extremely important universal way to cope with stress, make friends, learn, and be creative, it is not known how it emerges in individuals. A group of scientists in the United States conducted a survey of parents to understand how children’s sense of humor develops.
Children learn humor by imitating
Survey study conducted with the participation of approximately 700 parents from the USA, UK and Australia; He showed that the modeling theory, which is effective in child development, is also extremely effective in the development of humor skills. According to the survey, people begin to imitate and produce humor in the first years of their lives.
In the Early Humor Questionnaire, which included 20 questions, parents were first asked whether children aged 0-4 laughed or imitated verbal or physical humor. Then, by giving examples of certain types of humor such as “make fun of others, saying absurd things like cats have five legs, mixing concepts / bullshit”, “Has your child ever seen someone making such jokes?” such questions were asked.
Children meet humor before the age of one
More than 75% of respondents said their child started laughing when they were just two months old. Almost all parents noted that their one-year-old child began to laugh. The study, published in the journal Behavioral Research Methods, reported that there is a clear consistent age-dependent pattern of humor development, regardless of a child’s nationality or parent’s education level. The authors who conducted the study said that children first imitate humor and then they started to produce it themselves.
According to the results of the survey;
- More than 50% of one-year-olds start making fun of things by misusing objects, chasing them, making fun of them, or inventing strange words.
- By the age of two, almost all children start playing more aggressive jokes such as splashing water or pushing people.
- Three-year-olds start to make up their own jokes by imitating the sounds animals make or by knowingly misnaming objects.
Researchers, survey results; He added that he supports other studies that suggest that humor evolves with our motor, social, and language skills. Although the study did not provide a clear timeline for the emergence of humor, it did show that humor is present in our lives from a very young age.
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