Girl: "As soon as I get off this bus."

One of the best ways to develop the habit of finding more humor in your life is to spend more time around children. Their built-in joy and spontaneity and laughter cannot help but rub off on you. Even children with cancer are much better than adults at keeping the spirit of play, humor and laughter alive.

Some years ago, Erma Bombeck visited a cancer camp for children and adolescents in Arizona. Her impressions of this camp are summarized in her book, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Go to Boise. She was amazed at these children's access to their sense of humor. One girl was waiting to see her doctor and noticed on a window sill some plants that had gone unwatered and were dying. She said, "Well, I certainly hope he's better at taking care of his patients than he is his plants!"

A boy who had had a leg amputated adopted the habit of draping his artificial leg over his shoulder when in the car, taking great delight in the reactions of people in other cars. A teenager was asked by her friend, "What's your sign?" She answered, "Cancer, of course."

Another teenager undergoing chemotherapy noticed two preschoolers staring at her wig. She suddenly ripped the wig off and said to them, "See what happens when you don't eat your veggies!" The startled children ran off, but the teenager had a good laugh. [Note: While startling the children may not have been a nice thing to do--and is not recommended here--there is every reason to believe that this teenager still received the benefits of humor we've been discussing in this column.

Do these remarks mean that these kids were not taking their disease seriously? Absolutely not. They simply did not let their cancer destroy the strong drive toward play and humor that was within them. Even children who might later in life lose this strong playful attitude are able to keep it in the context of their illness precisely because they are still kids, and the drive to play is still so strong. They have the normal exuberance and joy of childhood and youth, and this enables them to maintain a zest for life.

My wife used to work in a pediatric oncology unit of a hospital, and often found the children using humor to take control over their fears and anxieties. One 8-year-old wrote a letter to her nurse (who has long hair), opening with, "Dear hairy scary nurse, I love spinal taps . . ." In the same letter she said that if the nurse ever got sick, she [the girl] would take good care of her and give her lots of shots.

While joking can be used as a means of denying the reality of one's cancer, that did not seem to be the case with these kids. Rather, it appeared to be a reflection of their success in coping with the reality of the disease. They refused to lie down and be depressed and become victims. Adults who are successful in using humor to cope show this same refusal. They are emotionally resilient, and the capacity for play and humor is part of what gives them this resilience.

So the key quality that serves children so well in adversity is the strong playful attitude they bring to their everyday life. We noted in an earlier article that play is a powerful adaptive skill, in both animals and humans. While play contributes to animals physical survival in the world (by helping them develop essential basic skills when they are young), it contributes to humans' psychological survival. It helps them adapt to psychologically difficult conditions.

Humor is a powerful coping tool for adults, but adults also have many other coping strategies available to them. Young children are more limited, but there is a long history of using play therapy to help young children deal with situations that are difficult for them to talk about. Through play and laughter, children are able to gain a sense of emotional mastery over situations that are otherwise very anxiety-arousing. When you can laugh in a scary night, the night doesn't seem quite so scary after all.

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