Playfulness and Cybersecurity are a Paradoxical Pair

It’s 9:30pm on a Friday night, and I am belting out my best Arnold Schwarzenegger impression while brushing the teeth of a grown man. My daughter stops crying for a minute to observe the scene, curiosity and just the smallest hint of a smile flickering across her face, just long enough for my wife to sneak the toothbrush in to finish off the last few teeth. She’s tired. In fact, she’s exhausted. It’s been a big day, and the premature destruction of her prized Duplo tower paired with the final item on the bedtime routine list (which she avoids like the plague at the best of times) has resulted in a meltdown of truly epic proportions.

Somehow by the end of the tooth-brushing we’re all giggling like school children, as I dutifully scrub the plaque from our beloved friend and babysitter’s teeth. We then manage to move seamlessly from the dreaded toothbrushing to bath time without further incident — turns out toothbrushing was not the last task, owing to the previously unspotted mix of, presumably, suncream and gelato stuck in her hair.

What happened here? Well, as it turns out, the research is actually pretty clear on this topic: silliness is infectious. It’s also — and I did not expect to be writing this sentence in a cybersecurity article — a big part of an effective toolkit for keeping your child safe online.

Laughter Is a Reset Button

If you’re a parent, you’ll be familiar with the often unhinged if not seriously deranged behavior that we resort to in order to get the job done. As your child ages, however, you’re likely to see less and less of this. By the time he’s a teenager, manic giggling is much less a part of you and your child’s everyday experience than mine at present. If you’re like me, you look back on those moments (however caked in sleep deprivation they were at the time) with a lot of joy. But being playful doesn’t have to be something that we leave behind as our kids age, and as I’ll try to convince you of momentarily, it shouldn’t be either.

But what the heck does that have to do with cybersecurity? Bear with me a moment, we’re going to get there. First, a note on what your playfulness actually does for your child.

Simply put, playfulness and laughter are the gateway to emotional self-regulation. Ramchandani and colleagues at Cambridge, with the LEGO Foundation, systematically reviewed 78 studies spanning 1977–2017. Children who got regular, high-quality physical play with their fathers showed better emotional control, less hyperactivity, and fewer conflicts with peers at school. Basically, “Physical play creates fun, exciting situations in which children have to apply self-regulation.”

Play is a form of social contract where both parties have their own side of the bargain to uphold, first and foremost of all that play needs to be fun for all parties involved. The moment a game ceases to be fun for both parties, you can bet it probably isn’t going to last long. Secondly, play is a safe space — that means that it’s everyone’s responsibility to make sure that things don’t go too far, otherwise someone gets hurt, something gets broken, and the game ends in tears. Crucially, in order for both of these conditions to be met, children and adults (yes, you with the pirate sword) need to intuit each other’s boundaries and use self-regulation strategies to bring down the level of excitement in order for the game to continue.

When children engage with an adult in play, it allows them to co-regulate: a dysregulated child that’s getting out of whack “borrows” a regulated adult’s nervous system, and laughter is the fastest handover there is. More than this, an AAP clinical report found that play builds executive function and buffers stress, so playfulness doesn’t just help children change their emotional state in a given moment, it helps them understand how to self-regulate and manage turbulence on their own in the future.

Finally, when you respond to stressful, difficult or just plain old exasperating situations with a smile and a laugh, you’re modelling a powerful lesson for your child. You’re teaching them the power of moderating their own behavior to cope with challenging emotions.

The Gap Between Knowing and Telling

As mentioned in our previous article, in a world of AI generated phishing e-mails, deep faked phone calls, and infostealing malware hidden inside popular gaming related downloads, there is no perfect technical solution. What I’m going to propose to you here is that the most effective defence (both preventative and remedial) against any threat that your child encounters online is your child’s willingness to tell you about it.

Whether it’s a virus-laden “Free Robux” download, the adult content he shouldn’t have seen, or a “new friend” that’s just recently started ever-so-slightly crossing boundaries by sending messages and making requests that are not altogether appropriate, the biggest thing preventing you keeping your child from harm is not ignorance, but the shame that stops them from telling you that something has happened.

It’s the gap between knowing and telling.

It’s not the scammer or the virus or the unsafe person that your child is afraid of. It’s our reaction they fear. The face we’ll make. The tone of our voice. Our anger. Our disappointment.

Our job as parents is to be the one that they can always run to.

Remove the barriers to confession

So how is being silly solving this issue, again? It comes down to lowering the barrier to entry for hard talks.

Jacqueline Harding, author of The Brain That Loves to Laugh, has some key findings similar to those mentioned earlier: shared parent-child laughter is associated with reduced cortisol, raised oxytocin and improved co-regulation. But there’s one more crucial detail that serves us as parents. Harding asserts that humour also lowers cognitive load, making hard information more digestible.

Silliness, playfulness, humour, and laughter then are not just good fun, (although please note that fun for fun’s sake is highly recommended: there’s nothing like some good old “structured, deliberately timed” fun to make you really regret coming to this office party…), they actually form the wedge that holds open the door for the difficult conversation, and most importantly, the uncomfortable confession.

With that in mind, let me just re-iterate what I wrote above: it’s shame, not ignorance, that stops your child from telling you about what’s happening online. See the link?

But does laughter really make such a big difference? Well, of 312 US adults aged 18–45, 63.0% of those reporting a positive relationship with their parents recalled parental humour vs 20.0% of those reporting a poor relationship, and 71.8% of those surveyed believed humour can be effective in child-rearing. To be clear, this is far from a complete data set: Harding’s book is not a peer reviewed trial, and the cited humour study is a self-reported pilot that favoured white (76.6%), male (63.6%) participants. Not fully convinced of the relationship-affirming power of laughter? That’s OK — but if the worst case is that you spend some more time laughing with your children, then the downside seems pretty limited.

Now, before you dust off your most infamously cringeworthy Dad jokes (although this publication highly approves of such content), let’s take a second to clarify an important distinction.

Laugh with, not at

There’s a caveat that needs adding at this point: humor used with a child builds the relationship; humour used at them — sarcasm, teasing, the funny story told about them to other adults — does the exact opposite. If you want to be the first person to know when sh*t hits the fan, avoid. ridicule.

So, in case you’re ever in doubt: if the joke needs him or her to be the idiot, it’s not the joke. As a general rule of thumb, silliness works extra well when you commit to being the idiot yourself. I know, it sounds very appealing when written like that, but give it a go, and do let me know if you end up brushing anyone else’s teeth.

Did you know? Sarcasm and irony rely on reading a gap between what’s said and what’s meant — intuiting the existence of this gap is something many neurodivergent kids struggle with.

If you’re the parent of a SEND kid, remember that rather than implication, we’re looking for silliness that’s absurd and physical, not ironic: think exaggeration, slapstick, or doing the obviously wrong thing with total commitment. And the rule against teasing is stricter here, not looser — a child who takes it literally has no way to file it as affection.

If you’re in the mood for some extra reading as well as truly heartwarming parent stories of children, neurodivergent and otherwise, just lighting up in response to silliness, check out the neurodivergent specific sections and case studies in How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen by Joanna Faber & Julie King (ages 2–7), or, for older kids, How to Talk When Kids Won’t Listen, also by Faber and King.

Get silly with it

Far be it from me to tell you how to be playful (I refer you back to my comments on “structured fun”), but just in case your silly muscles are a tad out of shape and in need of some warming up, I’ll list a couple things that have worked for me and for other parents.

• Use physical play as a part of your morning routine: spending 5 minutes chasing your kids around the living room busting out parkour moves because it’s tag and the floor is lava is a great motivator for getting dressed for school, and I’d wager it’ll leave you happier to boot — you’ll be amazed at how quickly habits become rituals that you treasure.
• Challenges, races (I can’t tell you how many meltdowns I’ve seen saved by the words “I bet I can put my shoes on faster than you”).
• For younger kids, turn inanimate objects into talking friends with silly voices: the hungry nailclippers, the disgruntled sock that needs a foot to stay warm, or a good old talking hand a la Jim Carrey in Liar Liar — I know, he’s an acquired taste, but you’ve gotta give it to him — he’s damn well silly.

You’re probably thinking: “there’s no way in hell my kid is going for a talking sock”, and you may well be right. You’ll need to adapt to your family, and keep it age appropriate. What works for your 9 year old is likely not to work for your 12 year old, and it’s certain not to work for your 15 year old (be sure to pencil in a few extra experiments when working with this particular age…).

Playfulness, humour and downright silliness are experiments, and there are no failed experiments, just experiments that give you better information for next time. There’s bound to be a certain degree of trial and error for what works, both for your child, and for you, so try not to sweat it. Just be yourself and try not to focus too much on the result. Humor is at its best when it’s authentic.

If your child’s a gamer, how about getting silly in their world? Join in with one of their play sessions and be willing to be the fool. Make a dumb name, learn how to spam emotes, or host a dance party. You decide.

Keeping them safe

Once you’ve dusted off your playfulness playbook and gotten back into the swing of things, agree on an absurd family word (the sillier the better — silly is memorable, and silly carries no shame). The use case here is twofold:

1. They can text it to you along with a location to be collected from anywhere with no questions asked.
2. They can say it at home when something’s happened online that they can’t find the words for.

Now comes the hard part. If (read: when) the word comes up, there can be no interrogation, no punishment, and no “I told you so” — replace these with a calm conversation the next day. Why? Because that’s the only way it works. Safe words are only safe if they come without repercussions.

Remember, we’re lowering the barrier to entry for embarrassing conversations here, and there’s a powerful message behind your actions in this moment that I believe any child will benefit from hearing:

“There is nothing you could tell me that would make me angry enough not to help you.”

As the digital world warps and expands almost beyond recognition in the years to come, it will touch all of our lives in ways that we cannot possibly predict, and our children will be the ones who feel it the most. We cannot stop it. But we can help our children navigate it. Your best defence is not technical, but human. It’s unconditional support, and a one-word way to access it.

It turns out online safety looks a lot like love.