Sometimes all it takes is a crooked face made while putting on a shoe, a funny noise while changing a diaper, an adult who gets a word wrong on purpose and leaves the child the wonderful luxury of correcting him. No great educational theories, no home laboratory with Montessori carpets arranged like a Scandinavian shop window. Just a laugh. One of those real, messy ones, which start from the belly and put the rest on hold for a few seconds.
Here, that small scene – a child laughing with an adult nearby – according to Jacqueline Harding, child development expert and researcher associated with Middlesex University in London, deserves much more attention than we usually give it. In his most recent work, The Brain That Loves to LaughHarding argues that laughter in children contributes to healthy brain growth, emotional well-being and the building of social bonds, especially in the early years of life.
The interesting thing is that here laughter is not treated as a decoration of the day, that nice interlude between a task and a crisis in front of the socks. Harding describes it as a complex biological phenomenon: it arrives before the neural development of language and involves multiple areas of the brain, including the motor areas and the prefrontal cortex, the one that comes into play when we plan, evaluate and make decisions.
The brain that trains by laughing
When a child laughs, the body is not just “making fun.” Heart rate and breathing change, hormones and neurotransmitters come into play, cortisol and epinephrine levels are lowered, i.e. two substances linked to the stress response, while dopamine, serotonin and endorphins increase. Harding also links these processes to memory, immune response and the ability to better cope with difficult situations.
On this point you need to keep your feet on the ground, which is always a good idea with children, especially when there are Legos in the house. Laughter is not a miracle therapy and does not erase trauma, educational difficulties or health problems. However, the scientific literature is moving in the same cautious direction: a systematic review with meta-analysis published in 2023 found that spontaneous laughter is associated with a greater reduction in cortisol compared to usual activities, despite being within a field of research that still requires more robust and homogeneous studies.
The best passage, perhaps, concerns the way humor works in the head. Understanding something funny means predicting, expecting one direction and then finding another. The brain has to resolve a little tension between conflicting ideas. It’s a kind of mental gym: working memory, frontal lobes, creative thinking. The successful joke, the absurd game, the funny face at the right moment ask the child to follow a detour. And in that detour you learn.
The reverse is equally concrete. Prolonged stress, especially in the early years, can disturb physical and mental development, hinder learning, make the response to stress more fragile in adulthood and also affect the immune system. Harding insists on this contrast: safe and playful emotional experiences are not a reward after “serious things”, they are part of the environment in which a child really manages to learn.
You don’t need stand-up parents
The good news, for those who already imagined having to prepare a comic repertoire between dinner, laundry and homework, is that you don’t need to become village entertainers. Harding talks about shared play, eye contact, smiles, closeness, shared attention on a small activity. A falling tower. A spoon that becomes a microphone. A puppet who says hello with the wrong voice. The practical point is there: laughing together, within a safe relationship.
In interactions between parents and children, laughter can support the release of oxytocin and strengthen synchronization during exchanges, that is, that kind of mutual tuning that makes an adult and a child better able to read each other. Some recent studies on laughter and social connection show a complex picture: research published in Frontiers in Neuroscience in 2025 found no direct evidence that laughter itself increases neural synchronization, but observed associations between laughing behavior, liking, and sense of connection. Ergo: laughing together seems to count, but the precise mechanisms are still to be clarified.
This caution does not take away the strength of the educational part. In fact, it makes it more useful. Because laughter works best when it remains human, situated, proportionate. A shared laugh can lower the tension of a room, make a difficult passage more digestible, lighten the cognitive load. A cruel joke, a sarcasm about the mistake, a mockery in front of the class do the exact opposite. The child’s brain does not only distinguish the sound of laughter: it also reads the context, the adult’s face, the tone, the risk of being humiliated.
The atmosphere changes at school
Inside a classroom, humor used well can become a kind of handrail. It helps to bring together complicated concepts, to fix an image, to transform an abstract explanation into something that stays with you. Harding proposes giving more space to happy and creative play even in educational contexts, especially in early childhood, when the brain is particularly receptive.
Here too, no license for chaos. It’s not about replacing reading, numbers, attention and routine with permanent recreation. It’s about remembering that a scared, overloaded, always corrected and rarely welcomed child learns worse. The theory of cognitive load, net of discussions between specialists, starts from a simple fact: the mind has limited resources while processing new information. An emotionally safer environment can leave more room for the task, instead of burning energy on controlling anxiety.
Then there is the question of co-regulation. In the early years the child learns to regulate himself because someone first helps him to do so. The adult lends calm, presence, voice, rhythm. Then that model gradually becomes internal. Harding connects this trajectory to laughter, play, hope as a repository of positive experiences from which the child can draw when he encounters frustration, fear, fatigue.
The limbic system, involved in emotions, behavior and long-term memory, develops together with executive functions, those that help us plan, evaluate and decide. This is why the emotional state of young children weighs so heavily on how they explore the world. A child laughing with a confident adult is not wasting precious time. He is experiencing a manageable world.
And it also applies to those who have lived difficult experiences. Harding talks about gentle ways to reintroduce joy and hope, lightening the load on the nervous system. You need tact, you need competence, you need to avoid any force. Useful laughter is not the one imposed on a sad child with the usual “come on, smile”. It’s what comes when the body feels like it can relax a little. Even very little.
Maybe we should take this less as a pause and more as a sign. A child who laughs while learning isn’t necessarily distracting himself. It may be that, at that moment, his brain found the oldest and most serious way to stay open. A laugh, sometimes, brings more order than a sermon.
You might also be interested in:
