‘I will grab a rifle and I will kill that bug!’: The role of children's humour in navigating painful treatments in a paediatric hospital in Argentina

Abstract

In the Argentinian healthcare system, medical residents play a key role in producing, sustaining, and witnessing intensely painful therapeutic interventions in children's bodies. I analyse the interactions between medical residents and children to focus on children's use of humour in a paediatric public hospital as a tool to navigate raw and invasive treatments. Humour was tactically used in two critical ways to deal with power differential: as a critique of power and as a collectivizing practice. When children are undergoing painful and invasive treatment, the importance of humour becomes prominent and its social effect and knowledge production more evident.

Humour, empathic concern and perspective‐taking in children. Cartooning about social inequality

“…In a study with focus groups among 7–12‐year olds, Dowling concluded that humour helped them cope with stress in daily life activities, by motivating them, accompanying their learning processes and creating memories with others that facilitated interpersonal relationships. Further evidence of coping humour among children was found in clinical settings (Dowling, 2002; Wainer, 2022).…”