The Essential Role of Humour in Supporting Bright Kids

My kiddo's first word was also his first joke. I didn't get it at the time but he'd sit in the bath with a bottle of shampoo repeating the word "Bam-BOO!"... and then proceed to laugh himself silly. What I realised later was that he was making word play with the word 'poo'. Poo has gone on to star front and centre in many of our conversations along with farts and bums.

Some years later, soon after beginning his schooling journey, his humour became more nuanced. When I announced one morning that I was getting changed out of my gym clothes before taking him to school because I didn't want to "wear all black", the quick-witted response from this budding comedian was "oh Devon, I think black is appropriate. After all, this is practically a funeral. We are going to the place where children's brains go to die."

For gifted children, humour isn't just about having fun. It's a vital tool for processing their unique experience of the world. As pattern-recognising machines, gifted children hold an extraordinary amount in their awareness: past, present, and future. They see connections, implications, and consequences that others might miss, including challenging realities about our world and existential questions that many adults prefer to avoid. This expanded awareness, while valuable, can become overwhelming without proper outlets for processing and release. Humour becomes their lifeline for processing these deep understandings while maintaining their emotional balance.

Humour as a Necessary Balancing Force

When parents and educators think about supporting gifted children, they often focus on academic enrichment or intellectual stimulation. However, equally important is nurturing their sense of humour and playfulness. Humour serves as a crucial counterbalance to the weight of their heightened awareness and pattern recognition abilities. It's not just a personality trait. It's a necessary coping mechanism that helps them remain functional while processing complex realities. Let's not mistake this as the outdated and damaging adage of "let kids be kids". What I am pointing to here is entirely different.

The Dance of Authenticity and Attachment

For gifted children, maintaining their authentic selves while forming secure attachments can be particularly challenging. Their intense awareness, deep feelings, and unique perspectives can sometimes feel at odds with the expectations and reactions of those around them. This is where the relationship between authenticity and attachment becomes crucial.

All too often, authenticity falls prey to attachment. When gifted children feel they need to modify their natural responses or dampen their intensity to maintain connections with caregivers and peers, they risk losing touch with their authentic selves. This disconnection can lead to increased anxiety, perfectionism, and emotional overwhelm. However, when we take their inherent worth off the table, separating it completely from their achievements or behaviours, we create space for both secure attachment and authentic self-expression. Play and humour create a vital bridge between authenticity and attachment, allowing children to remain true to themselves while building strong connections with others.

This is where humour plays a vital role. When we engage with and validate our gifted children's unique sense of humour, we're essentially saying "I see you, I get you, and I celebrate how your mind works." This validation strengthens both attachment and authenticity simultaneously.

The Power of Attachment Play

One effective approach to nurturing humour and emotional processing in gifted children is through Attachment Play, developed by Aletha Solter PhD and popularised through the Aware Parenting approach. This method recognises play, alongside crying and tantrums, as valid forms of emotional release that help children return to balance.

Attachment Play encompasses nine distinct styles: Power-Reversal Games, Nonsense Games, Separation Games, Contingency Games, Physical Contact Games, Non-Directed Child-Centred Play, Regression Play, Cooperative Games, and Symbolic Play. Each style serves a unique purpose in helping children process their experiences and emotions through play.

For instance, Nonsense Play can help address perfectionism, a common challenge for gifted children, by allowing both parent and child to playfully embrace "mistakes" and imperfection. The key is that these aren't just fun activities; they're therapeutic tools that work on multiple levels, strengthening attachment while supporting emotional processing.

The Impact of Play-Based Processing

When parents implement these play techniques effectively, the results can be transformative. Children might:

• Release tension through immediate laughter and move on

• Progress into needed crying or raging with supportive listening

• Return to specific types of play over days or years to process deeper themes

• Initiate play themselves when they need to process challenges, demonstrating their growing awareness of play as a tool for emotional processing

The outcome is often more than just emotional release. It results in children who:

• Sleep better

• Make healthier food choices

• Engage more effectively with learning

• Contribute meaningfully to their family and community

• Maintain stronger connections with their authentic selves
  

Supporting Your Gifted Child's Humour

Understanding humour as a necessary processing tool rather than just entertainment can help parents better support their gifted children. When we validate and participate in their sense of humour, even when it seems quirky or unconventional or downright weird, we're supporting a crucial aspect of their emotional and psychological wellbeing. Humour takes practice like anything else, so when their humour misses the mark, hold back from chastising them the same way you'd hold back from chastising a missed goal on the soccer field.

The key is creating an environment where children feel safe expressing themselves authentically, including their unique sense of humour. This means:

• Engaging in playful interactions regularly

• Validating all their attempts at humorous observations and insights

• Using humour to help process challenging situations

• Allowing space for both seriousness and silliness to occur simultaneously

  
  

Conclusion

For gifted children, humour isn't optional. It's essential. It helps them process their intense awareness of the world while maintaining their emotional balance. Through understanding the therapeutic value of play and laughter, parents can actively support this vital aspect of their gifted child's development, helping them maintain their authentic selves while navigating the complexities they perceive so acutely.

Next time you hear yourself starting to say "stop being so silly", pause and reorient yourself. Ask instead: "How can I join my child in this moment? How can I recognise this as an invitation for connection? How can I support their natural process of emotional release through laughter?"

Remember: when we create space for both seriousness and silliness, we help our gifted children develop the emotional resilience they need to thrive while remaining true to themselves. Over the decades, gifted education has often relied on individual champions who create change but see their work diminish when they move on. By supporting our gifted children to maintain their authentic selves through humour and play, we're nurturing a generation who can advocate for themselves and others from a place of intact identity and emotional wholeness. This is how lasting change begins.

And if you'd like to get better at reading what's underneath the jokes, the intensity doing the joking, the 5 Flavours Mini-Course is five short practices for seeing your child accurately, at your own pace, in your own home.

About Devon

Devon Harris is a parenting coach with a degree in the feild of Child and Adolescent Development and over a decade of work with young people across educational and high-risk settings. She lives in Daylesford, Victoria, where she coaches parents of gifted and radically accelerated children, and is raising one of her own. She has presented at the Annual Mensa Conference and writes for Mensa's TableAus magazine and the Victorian Association for the Education of Gifted and Talented Children.

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