Children laugh 300 times a day. Adults manage about fifteen.

The statistic is disputed in its precision but consistent in its direction: children laugh somewhere between 200 and 400 times per day. Adults average somewhere between 10 and 20. The ratio — roughly 15 to 1 — has been replicated across enough studies that the direction is settled, even if the exact numbers aren't.

Laughter is not simply the expression of amusement. In infants, it emerges before language — one of the earliest social signals the human body produces. In older children, it functions as play: testing social boundaries, rehearsing relationships, processing mild anxiety through a safe physiological response. When children laugh at something scary — a monster in a story, a jump, a surprise — they're practising emotional regulation without the cognitive overhead of explaining themselves.

Adults stop laughing as often partly because the world asks us to be serious in proportion to our responsibility. And partly because we've lost the orientation toward surprise that makes laughter available. Children laugh because the world keeps offering them things they didn't predict. We predict more accurately as we age, and the space for genuine surprise contracts accordingly.

My son falling off his chair was funny because nobody predicted it — including him. That unpredictability is the engine of joy.