Don’t Laugh When Your Child Is Crying

As an intern at The Cambridge Hospital, I was assigned an international attachment expert, Karlen Lyons-Ruth, as a psychological testing supervisor. During lulls in the testing, we met and discussed her research on infant-parent attachment. In a stroke of enormous good fortune, she offered me the opportunity to work with her data, examining the nuances of problematic parent-child attachment (Lyons-Ruth, Bronfman, & Parsons, 1999; Bronfman, 1993). This was when I started to look at parental behavior, in molecular ways, as a means to understand the genesis of psychological troubles. I started to see small behaviors, such as parents laughing, in a new way.

Understanding Infant Attachment

Karlen’s data set was remarkable for capturing a challenging population: Half of the parents were identified as neglectful or abusive. The other half were matched to the target ones on demographics but were not known to be abusive or neglectful. All of the children in the dyads I assessed were 18 months old, suggesting that abuse/neglect must have been identified very early.

I started my research at an exciting time in the world of attachment. Main and Solomon (1990) had identified a new classification of infant attachment, namely disorganized infant attachment. Ainsworth and colleagues (1978) had previously identified three classifications of attachment: secure, avoidant, and ambivalent/resistant. The powerful conclusion was that there are “patterns” of attachment, built up over time through relationships, rather than a series of independent interactions. There was one major problem. Many researchers, such as Karlen, had samples of children who had a reported history of maltreatment and yet demonstrated secure attachment to their parents. It didn’t make sense. In research that can only be described as brilliant, Main and Solomon reviewed these known infants coded as “secure,” even in the context of maltreatment, to see how they behaved. Main and Solomon found anomalous behaviors in the infants with abuse and neglect that led to the discovery of disorganized infant attachment. Though these infants “seemed” secure, they had unusual behaviors, such as approaching the parent while looking away and freezing while in interaction with the parent.

The AMBIANCE Scale and Problematic Behaviors

Karlen believed that there might be differences in not only the children but also the parents of these disorganized dyads. After an arduous microscopic evaluation of the parents in her sample with helpful additions from the existing literature, we were able to create a scale, AMBIANCE (Bronfman, 1993; Bronfman, Madigan & Lyons-Ruth, 2021), that successfully identified parents of disorganized infants and otherwise problematic parents (Madigan, Voci & Benoit, 2011).

After coding more than 1,000 videotaped interactions of parent-child dyads over 30 years, I continue my fascination with the dance of parent-child interactions. Problematic interactions are all around us. AMBIANCE, our scale, works by identifying kinds of behaviors that can alert us that there may be difficulties on the horizon. Some rare behaviors are troubling simply because they occur, such as moving in slow motion or freezing during an interaction. These are unique things that you don’t typically see in day-to-day interactions with your friends and neighbors.

Other behaviors are problematic because of the context in which they occur. For example, when you return after leaving a child with a stranger, and they hold their arms out to you, wailing, it would most likely be expected that you would pick them up. Ignoring them or walking away as they approach would be unexpected.

Then there are other behaviors that everyone has seen and just knows are not good right away, such as pushing a child to the ground. Then there are those behaviors that are only a problem because of their frequency. They may happen a lot of times in a row, such as not responding to a child speaking to you or demanding hugs/kisses/attention many times in a row when a child is playing.

Lastly, there are the behaviors that are surprisingly problematic. On the surface, they may not seem that bad. One of these behaviors, “laughs when infant cries,” occurs much more often in parents where the infant has disorganized attachment (four times more common in our original sample). Sometimes it seems funny when a child is crying over a little thing. That said, the findings are clear. It’s one behavior that is indicative of problematic interaction patterns.

Once it was on my radar, I started to notice this behavior everywhere, including in psychotherapy with kids and parents. When a parent and child laugh together, there is an amazing connection. However, it is very different to laugh at someone. Recently, in preparation for a medical coping presentation, the Family Medical Coping Initiative (FMCI) team at Boston Children’s Hospital (including Annie Banks, Gail Windmueller, and me) watched a YouTube video of a girl at her doctor’s office scheduled for three immunizations. Members of the medical team, as well as her family, laugh as she is clearly distressed. Her behavior is certainly unexpected and perhaps dramatic enough to have a humorous element, but the number of people laughing, the lack of empathy, and the response to her are startling: Little girl freaks out before getting shots at Doctor's appointment - Daily Mail.

Attachment Essential Reads

Anxious Attachment and the Sensitive Emotional Radar

Running to Stand Still: Why We Get Stuck in Inaction

Why Do People Laugh at Crying Children?

It is observing these kinds of interactions repeatedly that has led me to see the direct and corrosive power of laughing.

I still ponder why people laugh when a child is crying. The data do not answer that question. How many YouTube videos feature a humorous view of a child crying? How often have we heard a friend’s sad story and had an inability to process it or feel empathy at that moment? Could it be nervousness, inability to tolerate the sadness in the world, or triggering of our own traumas or discomfort? Maybe laughing protects us from unpleasant feelings. Maybe it absolves us from the responsibility for making sad feelings and situations better, or we think laughing makes the crier tougher for not getting the comfort they desire. The reason probably depends on the circumstance or the laugher’s unspoken internal world.

What does it mean to laugh when someone is crying? We know what it is not. It is not joining or empathic. It says your feelings are funny to me. I can’t take you or handle what is going on for you. I won’t help you. You are foolish to feel what you feel. Maybe even “I find your suffering funny.”

For me, it wasn’t immediately obvious that laughing when an infant cries is as problematic as it turns out to be. Now that I have seen it often enough, it couldn’t be more obvious. Resist the temptation to laugh when a child is crying.