The power of storytelling

Remember the end of The Wizard of Oz, when Glenda, the good witch, asks Dorothy what she had learned on her journey. Dorothy says, “I guess I’ve learned that when you wish and desire your heart’s desire but can’t find it, then maybe it’s in your own backyard and you really lost it to begin with.”

The ideas that many parents want their children to embrace—ideas like cooperation, kindness, or honesty—may be the hardest concepts for parents to understand. In the blink of an eye, the youngsters see that a conference is coming up and quickly retreat mentally, leaving behind a black expression that almost all parents acknowledge with a sigh.

Fortunately, “in their own backyard” parents already have a strategy that is fully capable of delivering these messages effectively to open and ready ears. I invite you to rediscover a secret weapon that you have always had and to which young people have always responded: History.

an ancient treasure

In these days of “virtual-this” and “electronic-that,” there are those who might relegate storytelling to the dusty realm of a bygone era. Yet storytelling remains strongly embedded in our human cultural experience after all those years. We see it emerge in many forms. From advertisers’ sales pitches to speeches by public figures to the announcers’ fervent promise of “More on that story after our commercial break…”

Among children, however, the storytelling has an even stronger and deeper magic. In fact, it seems that children demand stories as insistently as they crave attention or food!

Transfigured by stories

Parents around the world will attest to the phenomenon that children and stories are. The magical opening, “Once upon a time…” or “Many years ago…” will bring into focus the young eyes that, a moment ago, had been moving aimlessly across the ceiling. Informal event openings like “Here’s a story I heard today that you might like…” or “Did you hear the story about…?” keep your feet dangling and impatient to freeze mid-swing. A boy engrossed in the travels of a wandering fruit fly turns his full attention to the story’s narrator. The sense of focus is palpable.

As a Girl Scout leader, I was once hauling a van full of surprisingly raucous 6-year-old Brownies. Three times I stopped the car to reprimand the scoundrels for fighting, yellowing, throwing, hitting. It was all in vain. Lost, I slip a CD of fairy tales. Instantly, the entire charge calmed down. The would-be hooligans remained completely motionless until the story’s completion, at which point they almost instantly burst back into mischief. The next story began, and once again silence replaced the chaos.

Why is children’s attention captivated by stories? On the one hand, the pattern of the stories (a beginning-middle-end) establishes a structure that children recognize and understand. The ending is sure to be satisfying: the triumph of the youngest of three children, the accomplishment of impossible tasks, the glory of a troublesome arranged romance. Such popular themes in fairy tales prove to children, as Bruno Bettleheim says in his classic study The uses of the enchantment“that a fight against the serious difficulties of life is inevitable”, but that if one faces the difficulties, “you will overcome all obstacles and in the end you will be victorious”.

In fact, children seem to respond well to any story featuring magic or fantasy, perhaps because, being young, they live closer to the outer worlds of magic and fantasy. When my oldest daughter was 4 1/2, she had started the morning with a small hole in her pants that by the end of the day exposed most of her knee. “That hole is getting so big,” I warned him, “you’re going to fall into it soon.” “Are you kidding!” she said with a giggle, and then she stared at me-“right?” As the children enter elementary school, their personal sense of time and place sharpens, but the world of magic and the world of storytelling draws them in at the borders.

Contemporary stories of modern life can also capture powerful claims on a child’s heart when the story introduces the child, family members, friends, or other people the child knows. Openings like “Did I tell you the story of your crazy grandpa Louis, who sent the whole town into a panic when…” or “I’ll never forget what happened when you were just learning to walk and…” also captivate attention of a child due to the personalized nature of the story.

Add to all the factors the experience of listening to a story, that is, the voice of a storyteller, the impact of direct eye contact, the entertaining quality of hand gestures, facial expressions, improvisations, and dramatic reactions to events in history, and it is not surprising that children are mesmerized by stories.

The simple fact that stories reliably capture children’s attention creates a unique and meaningful opportunity for parents. While young children often respond reluctantly, if not outright rebellion, to direct parental instructions on how to behave, those same children will accept and absorb the same ideas when they are woven into a story.

As a parent, which scenario do you prefer? Recounting instructions to a child whose expression dares, “Whatever you sell, I don’t buy!” Or to offer those same instructions to a child whose expression says, “Really? Tell me more. Now.”

While we can agree that stories are a powerful conduit, it is also clear that stories by themselves do not necessarily convey positive messages. In fact, stories can just as easily send negative messages, and often do. Imagine that a story is a form of transportation, a kind of express vehicle. Its contents can be fresh crisp apples, or its contents can be boxes of explosives. The contents that are uploaded to the storytelling express at the beginning of your journey will determine what is received at your destination. As a parent, your role is to load valuable messages into your storytelling express and send them to their destination: your child’s heart.

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