Win a child´s smile! Not just your ordinary competition, and a great project!
We vaccinate our children against all possible illnesses – the measles, the whooping cough or the chicken pox. We are busied with the manifold prevention of physical diseases, but we think less about the preventions of psychic illnesses. The project "Win a child's smile" wants to draw attention to this fact. How should we immunize our children psychologically so that they are well equipped to face the world? We want our children to have well-functioning relationships, cultivate friendships and live a fulfilled life. But we also want them to be self-confident, to lunge into adventures and to be able to cope with the defeats that life will bring. We want them to be healthily confident, to stand up for their convictions and to develop a feeling of justice.
Our schools, psychologists, teachers and therapists have only recently begun to investigate how the character strengths of children and adults actually function. Martin Seligmann founded positive psychology and he set up a catalogue of human character strengths (www.authentichappiness.org).
The German Institute for Humour is taking a closer look at the strength called "humour" which has been rather sparsely researched so far. What do children laugh about and at what age? Where does humour help children to take life and themselves less seriously? Where can humour speed up learning? Where does it help children to cope with failure? Could it even speed up recovery in hospital?
Children laugh 400 times a day, adults twelve times and dead people don’t laugh at all. Even a layman will recognize a tendency, as Eckart von Hirschhausen accurately put it. Help us to change this! The more we know about the development of humour, the more we can expand humour as strength of our children. They will become more confident and competent. Imagine that kids actually like school and that humour becomes part of the education, for parents, in day-care centres, in schools and later even in universities. The more we know about constructive humour in people's view of the world and in their communication, the more pointedly it can be put to use. This already starts with children.
The German Institute for Humour is collecting stories, anecdotes, photos and other humorous items from your kids, together with the Wirtschaftsjunioren Leipzig (www.wj-leipzig.de) and the photographer Carmen Jasmyn Hoffmann (www.ef-a.de).
Please send your humorous experiences and your children's smiles to us! Send anecdotes, stories, pictures or questions to Eva Ullmann: ullmann@humorinstitut.de
We have a competition for the most humorous children's photo. Everything may be sent in: laughing children, pictures that the parents find humorous, things that children laugh about, anecdotes from children, anecdotes from parents about their children.
The deadline for entries is 31 December 2009.
A jury will choose the most humorous entries. The following prizes await you:
1st Prize: 1 photo-session for the whole family with the photographer Carmen Jasmyn Hoffmann
2nd Prize: 2 high-quality toys
3rd Prize: 3 humour trainings for one person each with the Cornelsen Akademie, plus Eva Ullmann's book on humour
On 1 April 2010, there will be an exhibition of all entries, and the award ceremony in Leipzig. The exhibition will be accompanied by a high-quality photo-book. The proceeds from the book will go the St. Maries School in India, another project of the Wirtschaftsjunioren Leipzig.
