So I need a little insight.
This note came home the other day from Jonah’s teacher.
“…When a friend was having a bad day, Jonah was laughing at him after being asked to stop. When given the corrective of ‘please make sure we are being kind,’ he held up his pencil to look like he was going to hit with it in two separate instances. He did apologize, but he [lost end of day privileges] today. Better day tomorrow ☺️”
So here’s the thing. Ever since Jonah was little, he has laughed at others’ misfortunes.
Whenever he hears babies crying, he laughs. Whenever he hears a peer having a tough time, he laughs.
When toddlers learning to walk fall over and start crying, Jonah laughs.
He was kicked out of LA Fitness’s Kids Club as a 3-year-old many times because he wanted to hear the toddlers fall over and cry. (And when they didn’t, he “helped them to do so.”)
I had to cancel my membership. 😬
So here’s the problem (the bigger problem).
There are appropriate and inappropriate times to laugh at the misfortune of others.
When Jonah watches a cartoon like Tom and Jerry and Tom runs into misfortune after misfortune, Jonah laughs. Every time Tom unknowingly steps on a rake that whacks him, or accidentally puts a fork into a toaster and shocks himself, Jonah laughs. And that is the “appropriate” response. It’s slapstick humor. The cartoon is MEANT to be funny.
But when we see that happen to someone in REAL LIFE, it is NOT funny. Laughing is NOT the appropriate response. (Unless it’s on TV, like something from America’s Funniest Home Videos).
It’s a complicated issue.
So when I heard that he was laughing at someone at school who was having a bad day, I had a tough time figuring out how best to correct him.
Jonah is not being intentionally malicious when he does this, but his behavior IS malicious to the person on the receiving end. It is not kind.
I KNOW Jonah is capable of empathy for others. He cannot abide Jonny being unhappy. He will scream “‘ALL DONE’ BUBBA IS SAD! I WANT ‘MAKE YOU HAPPY!’” And then sometimes he will physically try to force Jonny to smile using his fingers to literally “turn his frown upside down.”
So I’m trying to get Jonah to extend and generalize that empathetic emotion from “just Jonny,” to “ALL his peers” (maybe without physically moving their lips into a smile).
And of course, I worry.
We had an issue in the past with Jonah “coughing too much” while at school one day. He was sent home out of an abundance of caution. Jonah loves his school and he ended up having a huge meltdown over leaving. He thought he was being punished just for coughing while at school.
He didn’t understand about COVID protocol or spreading germs or any of that. He just knew that his actions (coughing) caused him to lose his privileges.
He STILL has anxiety about coughing to this day (and by “anxiety,” I mean, he will scream at ME if I even so much as clear MY throat within earshot of him).
I worry that if Jonah doesn’t differentiate between appropriate vs inappropriate laughing, he is going to develop a similar anxiety about laughing AT ALL while at school.
And he is such a happy kid, I can’t imagine what an “anxiety about laughing” would even look like in him.
Or maybe I just don’t want to.
Thoughts?
#Ausome