Sam Baker’s Reviews > How To Tell Stories To Children > Status Update

Storytelling is the primary way we pass values between members of our social group, including from parent to child.

Beyond the simple measures of truth-telling or deception, human beings use stories to get attention, simulate actions and behaviors (including emotions), and develop trust.

The thin line we tread between cooperation and competition with our family, clan, and neighbors has driven the development of remarkable tools to share information, withhold information, read the intentions of others, and impress or conceal our own intentions upon them. One of those principal tools is storytelling. [This] is how we tell people what happened, what we wish had happened, or what we’d like to do now.

Everyone is a good storyteller, and no expert can replace the intimacy of a story crafted from within a child’s own environment by an attentive and loving parent or caregiver. Why? Because storytelling is about the relationship, not the narrative.

[It is not about] telling blockbuster hits that spin off into movie deals. It’s about telling stories, simple stories, that feed the relationship with your child and will be remembered for the rest of your lives.

"Unreal beliefs in unseen forces... are
much more likely to motivate action than are modestly real beliefs."
-Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories