Keep Your Playfulness
One of the greatest gifts you can give your family—don't be an over-serious blowhard.
Your household should be full of joy and laughter. That means you should be able to laugh at yourself.
If you refuse to take yourself too seriously, everyone else will follow. A sense of playfulness should be part of the atmosphere of your home.
According to Edwin Friedman,
…the relationship between anxiety and seriousness is so predictable that the absence of playfulness in any institution is almost always a clue to the degree of its emotional regression.
By emotional regression, he means systemic anxiety in search of a trigger, overreacting to any perceived hurt, and taking disagreements too seriously. You know the type. They’re everywhere.
Our society has an obvious lack of playfulness. It’s hard to find approved subjects that are allowed to be funny anymore, though it seems like we’re finally starting to bounce back a bit, albeit with the enthusiasm of a deflated tire.